Can Jerry do the same with poverty and joblessness?
NOW that the National Assembly and the National Council have pulled their wights behind Jerry Ekandjo’s anti-gay motion, it would be helpful for them to do the same with other issues affecting innocent Namibians daily.
In the past two months, government ministries have admitted that poverty is eating desperate Namibians alive. There have been headlines about rising unemployment driving innocent and desperate teenage girls into prostitution to survive.
About two weeks ago, a mother went on social media to appeal to the nation for help to fend for her ‘fatherless’ five children. The woman is here in Windhoek, a few kilometres from parliament. She even showed her children in the video as a sign of how desperate her situation is.
The Namibian also carried her story where she told the nation that she was tired of selling her body and needed help like yesterday.
As important as they are, all these issues were not taken up by anyone in parliament with the same zeal and foaming mouths as we saw during the anti-gay speeches and anti-gay venom-spitting episodes in parliament.
Most of the parliamentarians who showed their angry teeth during the anti-gay sermons in the August House have never said anything regarding the issues of poverty, unemployment, lack of housing, ugly school curricula and broken families.
Last year’s high school results were pathetic and a bad reflection on Namibia’s future regarding skills development and job creation. The media did its part in trying to probe the causes behind the poor performance.
The anti-gay motion movers were dead in parliament while the education system was breaking. There was no spirited effort to make the education system work just as there was and still is a spirited effort to ensure that same-sex marriages and homosexuality dies.
One argument forwarded is that same-sex relations are an existential threat to mankind. One wonders if poverty that drives innocent Namibians into crime and women into prostitution is not an existential threat to humankind.
One also wonders if the economy that is desperately begging to be helped so that it can cater for unemployed graduates, forsaken single mothers, hopeless fathers who resort to suicide and the youth who see no future but in alcohol and drugs does not need the urgency with which parliament acted on the anti-gay issue.
It is a shame that our parliamentarians see the urgency in matters that probably affect a tiny segment of society that could one day get tired of using the wrong hole and changing their ways.
Can Jerry Ekandjo act fast on poverty, unemployment and lack of housing, just like he did with his anti-gay motion? Maybe, the nation can remember him for not only having been at Robben Island and defending us from gays but for making our lives better.
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