In this edition of the Namibian Journal of Social Justice, we grapple with Namibia’s most urgent social justice question, namely inequality. Despite being classified as a higher middle-income country, levels of marginalisation and exclusion in Namibia remain very high. The Human Development Index (HDI) for 2019 was 0.646, ranking 130th out of 189 countries. The IHDI (inequality-adjusted HDI) falls to 0.418, representing a loss of 35.3% (compared to an average loss of 26.3% for medium HDI countries). This profound level of inequality is consistent with Namibia’s unflattering Gini coefficient ranking, which is the second-highest in the world (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2022; World Bank Group, 2021; Human Development Report, 2020).
Uploaded date: 07 March, 2025
Graduation statistics of annual Namibian Grade 12 secondary education were used to link the school graduates’ achievements to the political regions’ economic development. It is hypothesized that the various pre-independence educational systems caused inequity between political regions’ secondary education, leading to diverse economic prospects. Educational reform was expected to improve academic outcomes, especially within the disadvantaged regions. Two decades of panel data allowed the researchers to simultaneously address complex relationships between regional development, educational levels at high school, and the underlying causalities. Latent variables were used to determine linkages and impacts between these levels and socioeconomic relationships.
This paper explains how poverty and inequality are related but separate phenomena that exist concurrently in Namibia. The paper blends several approaches to illustrate the links between poverty and inequality, using dependency theory to show how global value chains have entrenched inequality. It argues for the capabilities approach to analyze both poverty and inequality and sets a political economy framework to understand the origins of poverty and inequality in Namibia. The paper examines the changing landscapes of poverty between 1990 and 2016 using the existing four waves of the Namibia Household Income and Expenditure Survey.
Past pandemic experiences in the 20th century indicate that diseases overlap with social conditions, particularly when there is a significant contraction in economic activities, resulting in different outcomes for different population segments. On average, this intersection between biological and sociological factors disproportionately hurts the marginalized, further widening existing social inequalities; Namibia is no exception. When Namibia recorded her first two COVID-19 cases on 13 March 2020, as was the case in most affected countries, the science that guided the Namibian Government’s policy response was largely based on an infectious disease model.
In October 2019, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) filed an application against Samancor Chrome at the Johannesburg High Court, accusing the company’s directors and board members of self-enrichment through corporate corruption, fraud, and profit-shifting practices in the form of billions of Rand sent to tax havens overseas (Alternative Information & Development Centre, 2019). This is a landmark case and deserving of study for a number of reasons. It is one of the only – if not the only – known cases of workers attempting to take their company’s senior management to court specifically over profit-shifting practices. The testimony provided by an ex-director turned whistleblower also provides a rare inside look at how transnational corporate corruption operates on the ‘inside’.
The “scramble for Africa” at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 describes powerful European nations dividing Africa between themselves and represents the occupation and colonization of much of the continent. Even though Africa is no longer made up of a collection of colonial territories, sovereignty is weighed down by the persistent dynamics of neo-colonialism. Africa’s subordinate position as the supplier of natural resources to former colonial powers and importer of manufactured goods has remained practically unaltered.
This article is a critical response to World Athletics (formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations) and the western ethos of athletics for their sustained systemic exclusion of women, particularly black women. We make a case in defense of two Namibian athletes, Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi, who were removed from the 400-meter race in the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan due to the World Athletics testosterone rule. The rule appears to be primarily applied to female athletes from the Global South. This article argues that the testing regulation is demeaning, is based on questionable science, and targets women based on racial and gender stereotypes. We posit the testing regulation to be problematic and demeaning to all women, as it implies that women having high testosterone levels places them at a competitive level similar to that of men, and that testosterone is the sole key to their athletic success. This strategy, which we see as a form of institutional racism and sexism, has been widely criticized in international scholarship, media, and other public spheres. Mboma and Masilingi are amongst the black women who have recently been excluded from elite sports and subjected to this kind of scientific racism and gender essentialism.
Although Namibia has promulgated very progressive laws in support of gender equality and the empowerment of women, there is still a big gap between formal equality as provided for by the law and substantive equality. Substantive equality is demonstrated by key indicators like the incidence of multidimensional poverty; access to employment; ownership of productive assets; differences in incomes and wealth; access to social protection; levels of gender-based violence; sexual and reproductive health and rights; and the differential impacts of COVID-19. Budgets reflect governments’ social, economic, and political priorities and provide the fiscal means through which they can address such inequalities. The Namibian Government has expressed its commitment to gender-responsive budgeting to narrow inequalities between men and women, and to address women’s needs. This article reviews the central government’s budgetary allocations towards gender equality and the empowerment of women between 2014 and 2021. It uses a mixed-method approach that combines statistical data with qualitative interviews.
Social injustice is neither morally neutral nor does it happen in a social vacuum. To create an authentic environment that reflects some measure of social justice will need concrete symbols or life-enhancing goods. Thus, to genuinely reflect humane values requires outward expressions that concretize our social order. This socioreligious and ethical analysis, as a framework, explores the need for such a tangible response to social injustice. For instance, liberty, which is a central value for a civilized society, must provide more than conducive social conditions. It requires actual conditions of liberty that will authenticate and guarantee the continuation of post-independence social conditions. These conditions are needed not for political reasons but as an ethical pursuit to humanize society. We intend to explore tentative answers to the key questions: What does it mean to be human in Namibia? What are the symbols of justice needed to express a fuller human experience?
As Namibia celebrates thirty-two years of independence, social problems have become more pronounced, and many community members are denied social justice. Mindful of the fact that issues of social justice are not marginal to the mission of the Christian church, this article examines the role of the church in addressing social concerns of Namibian people, more than 90 percent of whom identify as Christian. This article considers it important to conceptualize social justice and analyze the engagement of the church in social concerns in pre- and post-independence Namibia. Methodologically, it uses qualitative discourse analysis based on secondary sources. The church has been criticized for not taking a clear and firm public stand when it comes to gross inequalities and injustices that bedevil modern-day Namibian society.
In Namibia’s socio-economic landscape, it is apparent that land inequality is a harbinger of many other forms of inequality. Historical accounts are replete with assertions that the fight for independence was by and large about land (see e.g., Botha, 2000; Pankhurst, 1996; Werner, 1993). What stretches credulity in the post-independence era is that patterns of land distribution have remained largely undisturbed. The Namibia Statistics Agency damningly reveals that previously advantaged farmers (read whites) own 27.9 million hectares (70%) of the freehold agricultural land, compared to 6.4 million hectares (16%) owned by previously disadvantaged farmers (Namibia Statistics Agency, 2018, pp. 12, 30).
The World Bank’s report on inequality in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) recommends improving security of tenure in both urban and rural areas to significantly benefit household income and equity. Land ownership was identified as an anti-poverty tool. The Bank argues that secure tenure is important for agriculture and food security, as it provides incentives for farmers to invest in land and security, to borrow money for agricultural inputs, and to make improvements. “Land ownership increases household consumption and significantly reduces the probability of falling into poverty,” the report stated (World Bank, 2022).
Large parts of Namibia’s central northern regions were occupied by the Hai||om during pre-colonial times. This includes the territory of what is today known as Etosha National Park, one of Namibia’s foremost tourist destinations. Etosha has since time immemorial been part of the traditional territory of the Hai||om people, and on this basis, the Hai||om people are entitled to ownership, or rights of exclusive beneficial occupation, of the land. The Hai||om, a former hunter-gatherer community in Namibia, is the largest of Namibia’s six San (Bushmen) groups in Namibia. In 1884, “South West Africa” was declared a German protectorate. At the Berlin Conference the following year, Germany undertook to “watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being.”
Inequality refers to differences in the distribution of power, resources, and opportunities between and within different groups in society. These differences can relate to income, employment, earnings, assets, health, education, and access to basic services and infrastructure (Maluleke, 2019). Namibia and South Africa are amongst the most unequal societies in the world, characterized by a myriad of social and economic inequalities, including in income and wealth, health, education, energy, and gender (Deghaye et al., 2014). These inequalities are rooted in the countries’ brutal racist history of colonialism and apartheid and thus strongly pronounced along racial lines.
This case study will look at the current political, economic, and social challenges in Eswatini and how recent ongoing political protests against the monarch have been gaining momentum over the past year. Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is both the last absolute monarchy in Africa (Sherinda, 2021) and the most unequal country on the continent (Seery et al., 2019). The link between autocracy and inequality will be investigated to understand the ongoing political protests, heavy-handed security response, and current impasse. Rather than ‘state capture’, a term that became popular in political discourse relating in particular to the actions of former President Jacob Zuma in South Africa, I would call what has been happening in the small landlocked southeast African country of Eswatini since Mswati III’s accession to the throne in 1986, as ‘kingdom capture’ – the abuse of power, weak governance, lack of political representation, human rights violations, and the looting of state resources, all conducted to benefit the king and his immediate family of 15 wives and 35 children to the detriment of the 1.17 million citizens of the country, 70 per cent of whom rely on subsistence farming (World Food Programme Eswatini, 2021).
On 23 December 2020, more than 2,000 Shoprite workers went on strike, demanding better salaries and improved working conditions. Temporary workers, some of whom had been employed for more than 10 years, were paid between N$1,200 and N$1,600 per month. Permanent workers were paid between N$2,000 and N$3,000 per month. Shoprite, which boasted a net cash position of N$10 billion that year, flatly rejected the workers’ demands, saying that it is not part of its culture and practice to pay transport and housing allowances to its workers.
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