Okahandja Coalition

By Asser Ntinda

For several months now, opposition parties have been secretly meeting to discuss the possibility of forming a coalition that would bring them together and mount what they call a “serious challenge” against SWAPO Party. The process has been slow in coming, largely because some of the parties have been hesitant to compromise the “principles and guiding documents” for a loose coalition whose relevance and reasons for existence none could define.

Shortly after its formation, the Rally for Democracy and Progress, RDP, was reluctant to support the idea. It hoped and believed that it had “enough muscles” to “shake” SWAPO Party by going it alone. It was woefully and horribly wrong. It exaggerated its popularity to the extreme, as it learned later.

Lessons learned from its dismal performance in Eenhana Constituency in Ohangwena Region, in Omuthiya in Oshikoto Region and in Tobias Hayinyeko in Khomas Region, drilled some sense into RDP, graphically showing that it was no match for SWAPO Party. The idea of a coalition started rolling back on the drawing board again, and RDP, this time around, was its principal driver, with its eyes set on celebrated muster puppeteers, whose political formations have successively failed to make a dent of SWAPO Party’s national appeal.

By cobbling them together, RDP’s Hidipo Hamutenya thought he had discovered a “brilliant strategy” to “unseat and capture power” from SWAPO Party. Always a careless and short-sighted politician, his predictions always go way off the mark, woefully. When Hamutenya resigned from SWAPO Party towards the end of 2007, he said he was “leaving SWAPO Party and Parliament with a heavy heart” as he could no longer be part of a “team that has lost focus.” SWAPO, he went on, had “lost a sense of purpose and direction.”

As he muffed along, he expected a “mass exodus” from SWAPO Party to follow him, ending the press conference with this “you will see things in the coming months. You just wait.” He was so confident that he believed that SWAPO, without him, would fall apart. After the Eenhana and Omuthiya debacle, he was rarely seen in public. There, the people told him in no uncertain terms that it was him, not SWAPO, who “has lost a sense of purpose and direction.” Thereafter, he was just too embarrassed to appear in public. Until the Queen’s Birthday came around in June 2008, and he finally chose to appear in public at the Queen’s Birthday Bash, only to “collapse” in public because of the “bad food” he had earlier eaten. The pressure was too much. Things were not going the way he thought they should.

I thought he had learned a lesson or two and would therefore be careful in making unrealistic predictions. He had not. During last year’s National Assembly and Presidential elections, he predicted “30 seats” for RDP. With a “data-base” of 390 000 registered members, that wasn’t a bad guess. But the “data-base” was artificial and concocted to create some sense of importance for him. If not, then RDP is infested with many hibernators. How else can one explain that out of its 390 000 registered members, only 90 000 voted for RDP? Again we thought he had learned a lesson. Not at all.

Then came the “mother of all battles” – Okahandja by-election. With the backing of seven political parties, Hidipo saw “victory” for the coalition. Showered with praises like the “messiah of opposition parties” by his new found “comrades” in the coalition, Hidipo was back into his former self, seeing beyond the by-election and predicting that things “would never be the same again!”

Look at this: “Never again will we allow SWAPO alone to determine the destiny of this nation,” he told the coalition alliance last weekend. “We will influence the political direction of this country and that is why we decided to put aside our differences to achieve a better Namibia.” For him, no place was better than Okahandja to “turn Namibian politics upside down.” After all, that was the place where the Hereros and Namas signed a peace treaty to face the Germans.

Okahandja, Hidipo reasoned, was the best place to start an onslaught against SWAPO Party and “unseat” it from power. Flanked by the “Bullet of Okahandja,” Christophina Paulus, Hidipo proclaimed to all and sundry: “Let us start afresh to bring Okahandja to the fore again. Let us stick together and solidify our unity of purpose and a bright future for Okahandja. Don’t let victory slip out of our hands.”

But victory was not in their hands, as the results of the election have shown. Eight political parties united against SWAPO Party and all they could get are 1559 votes! What a pathetic performance! What else will they say or do next time? Boycott the results, as they did with the National Assembly and Presidential elections? There is honour in accepting defeat. Hidipo, display some degree of magnanimity and accept that your political journey ends there. Or do you want to be humiliated throughout the country again? Become a punching bag, if you so wish.

We knew that the coalition would not produce anything credible. How can, for goodness sake, eight political parties with different political programmes and manifestos, pull out a strong and credible coalition that can be a force to reckon with? There is nothing that binds them together. They have many fundamental differences -- not “little differences” as Hidipo would want us to believe -- that set them apart. The only thing that has brought these eight parties together is their hatred hatred SWAPO Party. Beyond that, they have nothing in common.

Taking hatred as a unifying factor is myopic, in content and form. You only took hatred against SWAPO Party to the voters in Okahandja. The humiliating defeat that you suffered this week is your reward for having done just that. The coalition has collapsed before it could even take off. I have said, more than once, that bad-mouthing is no virtue, and political tantrums do not inspire voters. The reason history repeats itself is that some people were not listening the first time. The coalition has been cut and pasted into the dustbin of history just in round one. You can’t put it together anymore. It has dismally failed. You are therefore finished. Nobody will take that coalition seriously anymore. It is game over in round one. Bon voyage!