Only two months after the Central Executive Committee of the National Union of Namibian Workers’ (NUNW) decided to drop out of the Namibian BIG Coalition, the 600 delegates at the annual congress of NUNW elected a new Executive Committee and voted to rejoin the BIG Coalition.
The CEC’s decision to drop out of the BIG Coalition could have been a major political blow for the BIG movement. Instead the announcement was followed almost immediately by an outpouring of support for BIG in public forums in Namibia. Now, with the reversal of the NUNW’s decision, the entire incident has become a BIG victory (so to speak). Instead of marginalizing the issue, the (former) union leadership’s decision demonstrated how broad the support for BIG is in Namibia and how out of touch that group of leaders was. BIG was not the only issue in the decision to change leadership, but it was an important one. According to Herbert Jauch of the Windhoek Observer, “The congress decision on the BIG will not only redirect the NUNW leadership but will also increase the pressure on the Namibian government to seriously consider the introduction of a national BIG as a tool to fight poverty.”
For more information about the NUNW Congress, a see, “The NUNW Congress: A turn-around?”
By Herbert Jauch, published in the Windhoek Observer, September 10-16, 2010. A PDF of this article is online at:
https://www.archiv-grundeinkommen.de/namibia/20100910-The-NUNW-Congress-A-turn-around.pdf
