Have a good weekend but vote first

Friday is Namibia's general election, and has been declared a public holiday (was the last election day a public holiday?) ,  Anyway, the day is a Friday, and coupled with the fact that it falls at the end of the month, the temptation may be to utilise your hard earned pay packet to do some plentiful 'shopping' at the local bottle store, and head off for a pre-Christmas long weekend - maybe just you and your special other, not all the extended family and kids whom you will have next month.

You are quite entitled to do that, and I wish everyone a great weekend anyway, but, should you hopefully be registered on the voters' roll, please cast your vote first.  Just a week or so ago, there was a bye-election in Windhoek West, where the winner was elected on a 12% turnout.  Please be advised, our fighters for democracy did not put their lives on the line for the sake of 88% 'no-shows' or 'don't cares'.

For those cynics who say that their single vote doesn't matter, recall the infamous 2000 US election, where, after weeks of confusion and re-counts, it appeared that George W. Bush won by a margin of 9 votes in a nation of nearly 300 million.  We all know what happened thereafter - 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq etc etc.

Of course, the Namibian election will not be so close, but even, as often happens in new African democracies, where there is a hugely dominant ruling party, and a weak opposition, one must vote anyway..  Even if you are an opposition supporter, totally disillusioned by the fragmentation and triviality of the so-called opposition parties, where such parties often seem to consist of little more than three initials, a flag, the leader, and his dog, you should turn up and put your paper in the box, or press the button on the voting machine, as the case may be.  When you get turnouts of 80%+, governments have to listen, and it is much better than street riots, as in the case of Burkino Faso.  12% turnouts mean the slow, or not so slow, death of democracy.

Running out of energy

Last Thursday I was at the NCCI sponsored Namibian energy policy forum  It was a well-attended, gathering, with both the Minister of Mines and Energy and the Minister of Trade and Industry present, together with the present CEO of Nampower and his iconic forebear Dr. Leakey Hangala.

Initially expecting a routine procession of Powerpoints, I soon smelt the dissent in the air.  Were the main players in the country's energy industry simply manning their long-standing barricades, or were new policy conflicts emerging?

We had the Hon Minister of Trade and Industry showing that Namibia had the most expensive power in the SADC region, with the possible exception of Mauritius - an island 2000km out in the Indian ocean, and twice as expensive as our land-locked neighbour Botswana.

We had Dr. van Pletsen representing the private investor and his role in national energy policy, presenting his plans for a wind farm in Luderitz, but mainly lambasting Government for its penchant for encouraging private investors to spend their money in researching and piloting power schemes, but refusing to provide them with adequate guarantees (principally that it would purchase their power, and safeguard them against force majeure events, in other words problems arising which were outside the private company's control).  We had Mr  Vernetti presenting plans for the '250 megawatt' project (Namibia's current peak demand is about 560 MW, excluding certain mines) - this is apparently a hybrid scheme of diesel, solar and gas generation.).  Then there was Mr. Gschwender, the team leader for the biomass project, proposing to turn invader bush into fuel for conventional fuel power stations, such as van Eck in Windhoek.

Then, when it came to question time, Dr. Hangala upset the apple cart by laying into the Kudu gas project, now in an advanced stage of planning (but how advanced is advanced?).  He said it was unviable, and he probably meant that in the era of cheap gas, driven by American fracking, Kudu gas will probably be otally uncompetitive.

What puzzles me is that, when I first came to Namibia shortly after independence, the existing power stations of course were the ones from the colonial era - Ruacana, the coal fired station in Windhoek, with its landmark twin chimneys, and a small station in Walvis Bay.  Nearly twenty five years later, we still have the same power stations, with the country's greatly increased power consumption filled in by ad hoc imports.  There must have been innumerable conferences, proposals, feasibility studies and policy documents on energy - and nothing to show for it.  How is this possible?

But the next day, the Minister of Mines and Energy travelled to Omaruru to break the ground for a solar photo-voltaic system backed to the tune of N$84m by the French company Innosun, to add a modest but useful 4,5MW to the country's grid.  "Other investors just talk but nothing happens" said the Minister, spade in hand.  The price of the solar power will be expensive, but at least there will be literally something on the ground by next year.  An extra 4,5 MW of locally generated power since 1992.

Other investors just talk but nothing happens.

Other investors just talk but nothing happens.

Other investors just talk but nothing happens.

One more step for mankind

In nearly all cultures, the pattern of stars in the night skies is taken as eternal and unchanging, so that when a comet appears, stretching like a luminous great finger across the skies, it creates great excitement and wonder, but, maybe because of mankind's inherent pessimism, also terror as a portent of disaster, never as good news.  Even when a comet appeared in the evening skies over Windhoek in 2007, a businessman was murdered when up on a hill trying to observe it.  

Comets must have seemed spectacular in the days before people lived in cities with smoke, dust and light pollution dimming the heavens - nowadays, even when the arrival of a comet is much hyped in the media, you usually see barely a smudge in the sky.  Practically, comets have no influence over the earth and its inhabitants.

Astronomically however they are very interesting.  They are debris left over from the formation of the solar system,  like piles of unused broken bricks and tiles left at the edge of a building site.  Mostly, they originate in a vast area called the Kuiper belt beyond the furthest planets, and only a very few of them are pulled in towards the sun by the force of gravity, and become visible to us.  They really consist of a lumpy head or nucleus, composed of of ice, dust and fragments of rock,plus maybe organic compounds which excite scientists because comets colliding with earth thousands of millions of years ago may have brought the necessary materials (plus water) for life.  The comet's 'tail' consists of water vapour and dust which are boiled off the comet by the heat of the sun - it is blown away from the direction of the sun by the solar wind, so sometimes the tail can precede the head of the comet.  So examining the make-up of the head of the comet is like looking back in time to the beginning of the solar system, giving us crucial information about this and maybe even about the origin of life.

The European Space Agency sent up a probe 10 years ago to follow, catch up with and eventually land on this comet, with a difficult Ukrainian name.  In a hugely complicated path, it had to circle the earth's orbit three times, picking up enough momentum to fling itself out beyond the orbit or Mars, and eventually rendezvous with the comet - it was, like somebody said, like firing a gun in New York, the bullet bouncing off a rock in Africa and eventually hitting a bird in Beijing.  Yesterday it made it, and though the landing was not perfect, it was an astonishing feat, and an amazing feat of human planning, science and skill.  Definitely another great step for mankind.

November 2014, or 1989, or 1914.....

This weekend - Sunday 9th November specifically - is a weekend heavy on commemorations.  Firstly, there is the 25 year commemoration in Berlin of the 'Fall of the Wall' in 1989, and by extension, the collapse of all the Soviet backed regimes, of Eastern Europe, triggered by Mr. Gorbachev's intimation to the leaders of the regimes that they could no longer rely on the dispatch of Soviet tanks to back them up or crush
their rebellious populations.  Specifically, the East German government found they could no longer bottle up their entire population behind the Wall - the population was draining away though Hungary and other countries to the West.    


 On the afternoon of the 9th of November 1989, the East German interior minister made an unremarkable speech, towards the end of which he announced that 'limited' travel by East Berliners to the West was to be permitted.  Whereupon tens of thousands of East Berliners descended on the Wall's few crossing points.  The East's border guards, who had received no instructions, first of all held the mob back, then yielded to the inevitable and opened the barriers.  The wall was open, and thousands surged through to the West, not to cross permanently, but to meet long separated relatives, see the sights and go back home, at least for the first night.  But when the wall was breached, it lost its relevance, and would soon go: without the Wall, the East German state lost its relevance and would soon go too.  And if one communist satellite regime imploded, why not the others?  And then what reason did the main communist regime have to exist? So within a couple of months, all the the eastern European countries had thrown off the Soviet yoke, followed by the fall of the Soviet union itself.


I was there soon after, in fact just before Christmas 1989 - the wall was still there, and border formalities were still in place, at least for foreigners,  We crossed over into the East, and took a train down to Dresden, a very strange place, with little reconstruction from the terrible damage inflicted in world war 2, and had Christmas dinner in the People's palace of culture there - another very strange experience.

So, twenty five years on, there was a magnificent celebration in Berlin, even though, in a place heavy with history, the 9th of November has another connotation - Kristallnacht - when the Nazi regime led its first attack on Jewish businesses, culminating in the Holocaust.  Nobody seemed to be thinking of that last night.

The Wall is nearly all gone now, and a young person could visit the city without knowing where it stood or indeed knowing anything about it at all.  So the city put up a string of 7000 self luminous balloons along the line of the former wall, and last night after all the fireworks, speeches, music and massive street parties in front of the Brandenburg gate, let them fly one by one into the night, to symbolise freedom and the soaring human spirit, as a total opposite to the lifeless, leaden concrete of the Wall.  It was a brilliant spectacle, maybe even worth the air Namibia flight to Germany, and I hope you saw it on TV.

Then across in the UK, the same day was Remembrance Sunday, the day in which the dead of Britain and the Commonwealth are remembered.  This year especially relevant, as it is the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1, in which Namibia was the site of the first conflicts.   In London, around the famous Tower of London, there is an amazing display 888 000 red ceramic poppies, to symbolise the lives of each of the British soldiers killed in the war.  It is vast, amazing and beautiful, and gives a powerful impact of how huge a number nearly a million is.  There's a picture of it above.

Of course, in 1989, on the other side of the world, UN resolution 435 had been passed, and Namibia was rapidly advancing to independence.  Nearly all the countries of Africa wee independent, and many were converting from autocracies to multi-party democracy.  All seemed right with the world.  All the issues which had been dogging the twentieth century: the cold war, imperialism, colonialism, racism and international mistrust, seem to have been resolved, and Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous book called "The end of history".  If history was mostly about war, and there were to be no more wars, what would there be to write about?  
For a time, and apart from the tragic conflict in the former Yugoslavia, he seemed to be right. 

But Mr. Gorbachev, now 83, was present at the weekend's Berlin celebrations, and in his speech cast a cloud over the event.  We are facing the prospect, he said, of entering a new cold war?  Why?
There was one exception to the general boom and prosperity throughout the world in the 1990's.  This was Russia, whose economy imploded after the fall of the soviet union.  State assets were sold off at ludicrous prices to the so-called oligarchs, who became fabulously wealthy, at the expense of the rest of the population.  The former satellite countries of eastern Europe had thrown off Russian influence entirely, and for the most part had become members of the European Union and NATO.  

The head of state who presided over this chaos, Boris Yeltsin, handed over power exactly at the end of the millennium, on 31st December 1999, to a little known ex-KGB colonel, Vladimir Putin, whose most famous dictum was that the collapse of the soviet union was the greatest disaster of the twentieth century.  Slowly, the image of Russia changed, from a rather ramshackle but fairly open good humoured society, to a sullen, revanchist country, with increasing government, i.e. Putin control, over the media, accompanied by harassment of internal dissidents and occasion murder of external ones, corruption which characterises nearly all oil-based economies, run of course by Putin cronies, and an increasingly truculent and aggressive foreign policy, determined  not to give another inch to the West, and if possible, take one back.  This came to a head in the present crisis in Ukraine, a country which Putin regarded as fundamentally within the Russian sphere of influence, if not a part of Russia itself, whose nominal independence was tolerated so long as there was a pro-Russian government in power.  

When pro-Western demonstrators overthrew this a year ago, the gloves were off.  Putin seized the opportunity to annex Crimea, which admittedly with its huge Russian naval base was effectively part of Russia anyway, and to stir up trouble in the ethnically Russian parts of Eastern Ukraine, with the object of ensuring that the country would be kept in a state of eternal, bankrupt turmoil, and never become part of the Western bloc, especially NATO.

So are the gains of 1989 becoming undone, and are we heading towards a new uncertain world order?  Maybe Mr. Fukuyama, still very much with us,  will have to write a new book about how 'history' has re-started again.

Namibia, Burkina Faso, and the US mid-term elections

Most countries, like Namibia, the UK and other democratic countries, hold their elections every five years or so usually all in one go, for president, members of parliament, and other officials, although minor  elections for local authorities may be held at other times .  In the US there are elections every four years (sounds like a compromise arrangement from an original five) for of course the President and most of the Senate and house of representatives (lower house) seats.  A sitting President may stand for another term, but only one, setting the general 'maximum of two terms' pattern, imposed of many countries by the West.  Interestingly, though, there was originally no limit on the length of time a US president could serve - the iconic leader during the Great Depression and World war 2, Franklin Roosevelt, served three terms and died during his fourth.  His Republican opponents thereafter, fearing a repeat performance by someone else, changed the constitution to limit the number of presidential terms to two. 

Anyway, getting back to our point, not only are there the main elections every four years in the US, there are the 'mid-terms' every two years, most of the upper and lower House seats are up for grabs (though not the President's position).  Was this because there was a high turnover of congressmen in the early days?  But now the 'mid-terms' definitely serve the purpose of a 'safety valve' and protest vote.  Usually the party of the President and/or government loses heavily, and the opposition picks up much support, which may or may not be an indication for the coming main election.

This time, the results were worse than usual for the incumbent, President Obama.  He lost control of both houses of the US congress to his opponents, the Republicans.  It may sound strange to many outsiders that a President can govern with both houses of parliament opposed to him (can you imagine President Putin allowing that!) but it happens in the US system, and it will force the President to compromise on his policies (if any) in order to find some common ground with his political opponents and to get something done in his final two years in office.  It is an effective check-and-balance - which of course may mean the same thing as stalemate and gridlock.

Now take Burkina Faso, where the incumbent president took office 27 long years ago after the death in mysterious circumstances of the previous President Thomas Sangara.  There is a seven year presidential term there, and sure, there was an election every seven years, whose openness was questionable.  Voters who disapproved could only console themselves that would be rid of him in 14 years, after the maximum length of time in office.  But no, when he was due to retire - out of the blue he wanted to change the constitution to allow him to run for another term, and maybe and indefinite number of terms after that. Tensions boiled over, with results which everyone has seen on TV - the president fled the country, showing that his motivation for the constitutional change was less than watertight, and there we a confused military takeover, whose outcome is not yet clear.  The system did not allow for any 'safety valve'.

What of Namibia?  The ruling party is very firmed entrenched in power, its mixed-economy policies are most uncontroversial, and the opposition lacks a coherent voice or a coherent political philosophy of how differently they would do things.  The election result is therefore a foregone conclusion, but if any public resentments build up, likely over corruption, badly run schools or difficult-to-access government services, where will such resentment go?  Five years is a long time to wait for the next election, and maybe Namibia could also do with some form of 'mid-terms'.