Civil Society in Namibia: History, Context and Possibilities (Part 6)

ANDRÉ DU PISANI WRITES:

If the "civil" in "civil society" has political force, it has to pick out those associations that are pressing a claim to citizenship. Without such a claim, associational life, the very essence of civil society will be in decline.

This means that different contexts would require different "modes of civil society" activities and actions inclusive of mass mobilization, disengagement from the State, civil disobedience, research and consultancy services, contributing towards a "new social contract" between itself and the State, and co-designing and managing new modes of governance, policy culture and policy performance in a number of sectors.



RESURRECTION

The real challenge may be to resurrect the politics of what one might describe as a free republic of divided and autonomous powers within the law.

Two further questions suggest themselves. In pursuit of their nationalist "moral project" of nation- and state-building, the Namibian state has been good at constraining, incorporating or, where they had to, destroying powers that lie beyond them. Can the State now be expected to create and tolerate such powers? And if it cannot, what can?

The answer to the first question is clear. The Namibian Government will only allow powers with a freedom under law that they cannot themselves direct and influence, if it believes that the alternative will, for it, be worse. In order to avoid being subverted by their own importance, the State will eventually concede to the importance of legitimate civil society organizations.

The political class at the centre will, however, continue to try to contain any opposition to its powers.



SOCIAL CAPITAL

In answer to the second question, of how lively and effective associations might be sustained against such political constraints, it has become fashionable to invoke the importance of "social capital".

Robert Putnam, deploying the notion to explain the varying quality of "institutional performance" in regional governments in Italy since the 1970s, followed James Coleman and others in distinguishing between "norms of reciprocity" and "networks of civic engagement" and argued that the second serves to reinforce the first. Civic networks construct reputations (of politicians), rise the costs of defection, make communication and co-operation easier, reduce uncertainty, enhance security and are more humanly satisfying than the miseries of social distance, dislocation, dependence and mistrust.

The central difference between civic and un-civic communities is that in the one, people follow rules in which they believe (hence the need to agree on "the norms of reciprocity"), and in the other, since they have no stake, they do not.

The mystery is not therefore why, once established, such habits should persist, but why they should be so difficult to form in the first place.



BALANCE OF POWER

It is clear that governance and politics do matter. However, to uncritically connect the associations of civil society with political parties and government itself, which is by-and-large what the advocates of an active civil society hope to see, can actually kill their civic virtues; the relations between political parties (particularly dominant/hegemonic parties) and various kinds of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) cannot be dense, and the party politicians themselves, however "democratic" they may be in name, are often predicated on presumptions of inequality and proceed on legacies of distrust.

The "new structure of normative thought" in the name of modern liberty that Giuseppe di Palma was not alone in believing he could see in the events in central and eastern Europe in 1989, the conviction that "the proper constitution of civil society" was central to democracy, was neither new nor true. The thought that what we now think of as an independent civil society is essential to a "moderate" or "liberal politics", in which powers respect each other and are in balance, dates at least from Baron de Montesquieu.

The thought that an active and independent civil society in this sense is essential to a constitutionally and procedurally sound democracy is simply mistaken. The nature of democracy in the United States makes that clear.



DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

The more important questions are whether a democracy that is constitutionally and procedurally acceptable can be made more acceptable still through wider deliberation, whether a lively civil society can contribute to that, and whether such deliberation can enhance the state?

Advocates of "deliberative democracy" in the United States itself suggest that the answer to each question is yes. Does it follow logically that the answer to each of these questions in post-colonial Namibia will also be yes?

There is another much more recent element in the equation, and that is that the governing elites may come to realize that they can no longer muster the moral and material resources with which to maintain their old projects, and will then retreat into a new politics of electoral competition. It is then conceivable that the local associations may then decide to connect with each other and press for changes in public policy.

In sub-Saharan Africa, as Naomi Chazan argued a few of these – improvement societies, credit unions, most especially organizations of farmers - appear to have been relatively successful.

What this analyst is prepared to put forward, is that we should be clear about what "civil society" (perhaps we should speak of "associational life" rather than of "civil society") is and what it is not in this country at this moment in history. We should also be clear what citizenship is and what it can be, be clear about what the State can do, and about the point of democratic politics itself.

(This is the conclusion of this contribution.)