Why I Wont Miss Namibian Meetings

One of the most frustrating aspects of life in Namibia, especially working for the government, is the over formalization of so many things. The worst part of this happens during meetings. Every meeting it seems needs to have an extremely formal structure with a reading of the previous meetings minutes, adoption of those minutes and a number of other pointless formalizations that have no place in a meeting of 10 people sitting in a small room. Furthermore, these different things are rarely done in the manner in which they are supposed to be done. So instead of these conventions making meetings more efficient and effective they serve only to slow everything down and cause what should be a half hour meeting to drag on to three hours or more.

This problem also affects the school work that is done. Recently I have been helping a community member with some of her distance learning assignments for the degree program that she is a part of. One of these assignments was an analysis of the place that she works. She was obviously given this very structured format and asked to do her report in this format. Of course by the time that it got to me to help her with some final edits it was a true monstrosity with a mismatch of formating as she tried to make the square peg of her report fit perfectly into the round hole format she was given. Of course her and the report would have been much better served by a very simple format since over formalization of a 20 page paper, in my opinion, detracts from the overall message. Then again she was more concerned with the cover and how everything looked rather than the content.

Though by this point I should be used to things like this since the whole education system has been built on the idea of rote memorization and regurgitation. Students here have an amazing ability to memorize answers to questions that they cant actually read using only key words that they recognize. From what I have been told this type of teaching is changing, but when all of your teachers were taught using a certain method it is hard to change the system very quickly.

The reason I bring up the education system at this point is that I feel it is somewhat responsible for the over formal structure throughout the society. If in school you are not taught critical thinking skills. If it is drilled into you that there is the one right answer, and that is the answer that you copy from the book, then that forms your method of thinking. Therefore, if you are told this is the way to hold a meeting, you dont know any better to question if this is a good way or not, just that there is the right way to hold a meeting and that is the only way.

I blame the British.