ETD Collection

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    Assessing stakeholder perceptions of effectiveness of Namibia's communications regulatory framework
    (2014-03-18) Stanley, Shanapinda
    Communications regulatory frameworks are established to achieve affordable pricing, consumer welfare, innovation and competition. A regulatory framework is therefore endowed with regulatory governance measures and regulatory incentives to enable it to achieve these purposes. In applying these measures and incentives, the framework becomes effective, or ineffective, if the framework fails. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to assess the perceptions of the stakeholders on the effectiveness of the types of governance measures and incentives implemented in Namibia because stakeholders are involved in the success or failure. The study of perceptions are important because they offer insight of informed stakeholders of how policies, laws and regulations are implemented for whom those policies, laws and regulations are designed, implemented and meant to impact. Such insights can inform the design of recommendations on how these measures and incentives can be improved to make the regulatory framework more effective, as it has done in this study. One of the main findings of the research was the perceived conflict of interests between the ICT policy role of the Ministry of ICT and its shareholder role over Telecom Namibia, negatively impacting on competition and putting privately owned licensees at a market disadvantage. The conclusion was that this regulatory governance design measure conflicts with the regulatory framework and requires legislative amendment and a re-design of the framework to achieve the regulatory purpose of competition and improve Namibia’s regional and global competitiveness.
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    Institutional dynamics and impact on capital formation: evidence from Namibia and Tanzania
    (2013-03-15) Zaaruka, Benethelin P.
    The purpose of this thesis is to examine the impact of institutions on fixed capital accumulation over time in two developing countries, both former German colonies: Namibia and Tanzania. This is motivated by two recent underpinning theories: the new institutional theory, which views institutions as fundamental determinants of economic outcomes and income variations among countries (the institutional hypothesis); and the theory of irreversible investment under uncertainty, which emphasis the impact of uncertainty on investment and capital-stock accumulation. The first part of the thesis deals with the measurement and definitions of institutions. Empirical measures of political and economic institutions have been previously produced; however, most cover short periods of time. The short time span of the institutional indices makes them practical in cross-countries and panel studies, rather than in country-specific studies. The importance of country-specific studies is underscored by the notion that different historical paths led to different ways of organising economic activities and political structures, yielding the differences in economic development across countries. To overcome this challenge, this thesis presents a database on institutional measures for Namibia and Tanzania for the period 1884 to 2009. These indicators are used to assess the nature of political and economic institutional transformation from the colonial legacy to the modern outcome, using Namibia and Tanzania as a natural experiment. Relying on archival information on formal laws in Namibia and Tanzania, the thesis constructs institutional indicators that are de jure in nature representing political freedom, property rights and judicial independence. These allow for the assessment of rules the game, rather than outcome. The formal codification of rights and freedoms is of little significance if those rights cannot be enforced. Therefore, the de facto element is also considered through the construction of separate indicators on political instability and judicial independence. A clear theoretical framework on each indicator provides the selection and combination of each sub-component. A meaningful composite measure is based on the techniques of principal components and factor analysis. v The thesis argues that despite changes in colonial identity in these countries (i.e. German, then British or South African), the broader framework of institutions remained partly the same, particularly in the case Namibia. It is true that, with the attainment of independence in Namibia, many institutions did change, particularly in the areas of political freedom, and judicial and political instability. Measures such as property rights, on the other hand, are slow to change. However, the overall long-lasting effect of these colonial institutions on economic outcomes remains an empirical question. Similarly, the case of Tanzania reflects the notion of institutional persistence as the country continued to undermine political freedom even after the attainment of independence. Tanzania is among the few countries which adopted a constitution without a bill of rights at independence. Also, the new indicators for both countries, while covering a long time period (1884–2009), correlate fairly well with some of the widely used institutional indices produced by Freedom House and the Heritage Foundation. The second part of thesis establishes the impact of institutional variables on capital accumulation in Namibia and Tanzania, applying the Johansen Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) technique. The data span for Namibia is from 1923 to 2009, and that for Tanzania is from 1946 to 2009. The findings highlight the importance of uncertainty (political instability) in explaining capital accumulation over time in Namibia. The results also show that other institutional variables are important in explaining uncertainty. Rising levels of property rights and political rights lower political instability in Namibia. The empirical evidence for Tanzania indicates the importance of property rights in explaining capital accumulation over time. The most interesting result is the importance accorded to the judicial independence, which showed a positive correlation to gross domestic product (GDP). It is also shown that other institutional variables (property rights and political rights) have a positive correlation to judicial independence. A further finding is that uncertainty (political instability) has a negative effect on economic development over time in Tanzania.
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    Civil-military relations in Namibia, 1990-2005
    (2009-09-14T10:24:54Z) Mwange, Matomola Vincent
    The period 1960-63 saw the independence of many African countries. Since then, the continent has experienced numerous military coups, attempted coups or military interference in politics. Consequently, many countries have found it important that the power of the military be used responsibly and for the benefit of the society. To achieve this they opted for subordination of the military to civilian authorities, yet coups and coup attempts have persisted. In contrast to this scenario on the continent there has not been a coup d’etat, attempted coup d’etat, or any form of unacceptable influence over the political process by the military in Namibia since independence in 1990. The purpose of this study was to determine the political institutions in the country that are necessary for democratic civil-military relations and how they have effectively contributed to the prevailing peace and stability in Namibia. Much has been written on civil-military relations; however, very little research has been produced on democratic civil-military relations in Namibia since independence. This thesis is a study of how Namibia took the path of democratic civil-military relations that have ensured civil control over the military. The research was informed by examining the generally held assumptions about civil-military relations as espoused in the literature to better understand the phenomenon of civil-military relations in Namibia that has ensured civil supremacy over the military. In this regard, the study was a qualitative method of research. This method helped to describe the concepts of civil-military relations using the guiding theoretical framework and thereafter helped to examine civil-military relations being applied in Namibia. One of the main findings of the research was that civil-military relations in Namibia are characterised by Western liberal civil-military relations traditions. The nature of civil-military relations in Namibia was influenced by factors such as historical legacy, the liberation struggle experience and the international context that shaped the Namibian state. It was also established through this study that the two main shortcomings of civil-military relations in the country were the inadequacy in parliamentary oversight of the defence and security, and serious deficiencies with regard to limited participation of civil society.
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    The silence of colonial melancholy : The Fourie collection of Khoisan ethnologica
    (2008-10-02T08:04:21Z) Wanless, Ann
    Between 1916 and 1928 Dr Louis Fourie, Medical Officer for the Protectorate of South West Africa and amateur anthropologist, amassed a collection of some three and a half thousand artefacts, three hundred photographs and diverse documents originating from or concerned with numerous Khoisan groups living in the Protectorate. He gathered this material in the context of a complex process of colonisation of the area, in which he himself was an important player, both in his official capacity and in an unofficial role as anthropological adviser to the Administration. During this period South African legislation and administration continued the process of deprivation and dehumanisation of the Khoisan that had begun during the German occupation of the country. Simultaneously, anthropologists were constructing an identity for the Khoisan which foregrounded their primitiveness. The tensions engendered in those whose work involved a combination of civil service and anthropology were difficult to reconcile, leading to a form of melancholia. The thesis examines the ways in which Fourie’s collection was a response to, and a part of the consolidation of, these parallel paradigms. Fourie moved to King William’s Town in South Africa in 1930, taking the collection with him, removing the objects still further from their original habitats, and minimising the possibility that the archive would one day rest in an institution in the country of its origin. The different parts of the collection moved between the University of the Witwatersrand and a number of museums, at certain times becoming an academic teaching tool for social anthropology and at others being used to provide evidence for a popular view of the Khoisan as the last practitioners of a dying cultural pattern with direct links to the Stone Age. The collection, with its emphasis on artefacts made in the “traditional” way, formed a part of the archive upon which anthropologists and others drew to refine this version of Khoisan identity in subsequent years. At the same time the collection itself was reshaped and re-characterised to fit the dynamics of those archetypes and models. The dissertation establishes the recursive manner in which the collection and colonial constructs of Khoisan identity modified and informed each other as they changed shape and emphasis. It does this through an analysis of the shape and structure of the collection itself. In order to understand better the processes which underlay the making of the Fourie Collection there is a focus on the collector himself and an examination of the long tradition of collecting which legitimised and underpinned his avocation. Fourie used the opportunities offered by his position as Medical Officer and the many contacts he made in the process of his work to gather artefacts, photographs and information. The collection became a colonial artefact in itself. The thesis questions the role played by Fourie’s work in the production of knowledge concerning the Bushmen (as he termed this group). Concomitant with that it explores the recursive nature of the ways in which this collection formed a part of the evidentiary basis for Khoisan identities over a period of decades in the twentieth century as it, in turn, was shaped by prevailing understandings of those identities. A combination of methodologies is used to read the finer points of the processes of the production of knowledge. First the collection is historicised in the biographies of the collector himself and of the collection, following them through the twentieth century as they interact with the worlds of South West African administrative politics, anthropological developments in South Africa and Britain, and the Khoisan of the Protectorate. It then moves to do an ethnography of the collection by dividing it into three components. This allows the use of three different methodologies and bodies of literature that theorise documentary archives, photographs, and collections of objects. A classically ethnographic move is to examine the assemblage in its own terms, expressed in the methods of collecting and ordering the material, to see what it tells us about how Fourie and the subsequent curators of the collections perceived the Khoisan. In order to do so it is necessary to outline the history of the discourses of anthropologists in the first third of the twentieth century, as well as museum practice and discourse in the mid to late twentieth century, questioning them as knowledge and reading them as cultural constructs. Finally, the thesis brings an archival lens to bear on the collection, and explores the implications of processing the collection as a historical archive as opposed to an ethnographic record of material culture. In order to do this I establish at the outset that the entire collection formed an archive. All its components hold knowledge and need to be read in relation to each other, so that it is important not to isolate, for example, the artefacts from the documents and the photographs because any interpretation of the collection would then be incomplete. Archive theories help problematise the assumption that museum ethnographic collections serve as simple records of a vanished or vanishing lifestyle. These methodologies provide the materials and insights which enable readings of the collection both along and across the grain, processes which draw attention to the cultures of collecting and categorising which lie at the base of many ethnographic collections found in museums today. In addition to being an expression of his melancholy, Fourie’s avocation was very much a part of the process of creating an identity for himself and his fellow colonists. A close reading of the documents reveals that he was constantly confronted with the disastrous effects of colonisation on the Khoisan, but did not do anything about the fundamental cause. On the contrary, he took part in the Administration’s policy-making processes. The thesis tentatively suggests that his avocation became an act of redemption. If he could not save the people (medically or politically), he would create a collection that would save them metonymically. Ironically those who encountered the collection after it left his hands used it to screen out what few hints there were of colonisation. Finally the study leads to the conclusion that the processes of making and institutionalising this archive formed an important part of the creation of the body of ethnography upon which academic and popular perceptions of Khoisan identity have been based over a period of many decades.