28/12/2025
Namibia’s Unfinished Liberation: From Apartheid to Ethnic Capture:
Between 1978 and 1990, apartheid South Africa engineered a calculated political dispensation in Namibia. Its purpose was not genuine reform, but containment: to blunt SWAPO’s inevitable electoral dominance in the 1989 elections. A handful of apartheid statutes were repealed, just enough to create the illusion that codified racial domination had ended.
In parallel, Pretoria invested heavily in international and domestic “information influence” campaigns, insisting that racism was over and Namibia was on the path to freedom. That strategy failed then.
But disturbingly, it has been perfected since independence—this time by those who once opposed it. Codified racial apartheid may be gone, but it has been replaced by something more subtle and, in some respects, more insidious: ethnic capture of the state. Tribalism, officially denied yet quietly entrenched, has become the new organising principle of power. Job reservation policies, justified in the language of redress, increasingly resemble the cruelty and exclusion of apartheid-era labour engineering. Access to opportunity, contracts, promotions, and leadership positions appears concentrated within one ethnic group, while others are marginalised or tokenised.
A small number of minorities are co-opted into visible positions, not to share power meaningfully, but to serve as window-dressing—proof, we are told, that Namibia is free, inclusive, and democratic. This mirrors the old apartheid tactic of “reform without surrender,” where symbolic inclusion masked structural domination.
Today, an uncomfortable reality confronts us: leadership across government, state-owned enterprises, regional councils, and local authorities is overwhelmingly drawn from a single community. Mayors, regional chairpersons, senior bureaucrats, and institutional heads increasingly reflect one surname pattern, one cultural centre of gravity.
The imbalance is no longer coincidental; it is systemic. In this sense, independence risks being remembered not as liberation for all, but as the transfer of power from racial oligarchy to ethnic monopoly. Where Afrikaner nationalism once defined the state, a new ethnocentrism now shapes it—quietly, defensively, and intolerant of scrutiny.
The painful truth is this: the eleven years before independence and the thirty-five years after it increasingly resemble each other in structure, if not in rhetoric. Power remains centralised, dissent is delegitimised, and equality is promised but deferred.
Namibia does not need denial. It needs honesty. True freedom cannot be monopolised by one group and still be called liberation. If we do not confront the rise of a new, black form of apartheid—rooted in ethnicity rather than race—we risk betraying the very struggle that gave birth to this nation.
Silence will not save us. Only courage will.