3 minute read
Appointment of an activist minister
SO WHEN SHE EXPERIENCED the brutal killing of her aunt in her parental home at that tender age, she didn’t understand all of what happened, but the outrage and anger of her relatives and neighbours made an immediate and lasting impression on her. As she grew up, she became determined to fight the injustices of poverty, crime and colonial occupation.
“I wanted to be part of the system that put criminals behind bars,” she says simply. Katutura wasn’t all bad, Yvonne says. “The area was rough, but taught me various lessons about solidarity, unity and sharing the little you had as a community.”
She adds, “Education was the only way I had out of the poverty, violence and substance abuse. I tried to balance the importance of being aware of our political struggle and ensuring that I still had a plan for completing school.”
As a Grade 8 learner at A Shipena Secondary School in Katutura, she was involved in student politics and the student uprising of 1988 but still excelled academically. By the time full independence fi nally ended 75 years of occupation on 21 March 1990, she had decided on a career in law. Her excellent academic performance saw her awarded a full scholarship by a non-governmental organisation, the Legal Assistance Centre, to study law at UWC after matriculating in 1992.
“The University of the Left was one of the few institutions of higher learning we identifi ed with in Namibia at the time. We had people like Bience Gawanas who we had great admiration for as our forebears. There was no other institution I was interested in. I knew UWC would be a good place to be and to grow intellectually, emotionally and politically,” says Yvonne.
An active member of SASCO throughout her university career (she was elected to the SRC in 1996), Yvonne says: “My political consciousness did not allow me to be shy and in the back. One of my early and most memorable experiences was when I marched to Cape Town in response to the killing of comrade Chris Hani on 10 April 1993.”
Although challenging, Yvonne graduated within the stipulated time in 1997 and returned to Namibia to work for the Legal Assistance Centre, where she put her experiences at the UWC Law Clinic and street law projects to good use. In 2001, she pursued her LLM full-time at the University of Pretoria, and spent four months at the University of Ghana (Legon) as part of the LLM programme. She worked as a civil and human rights lawyer until 2007 when she began lecturing in the Law Faculty of the University of Namibia. In her fi rst year as Deputy Dean (2012–2015), she received the Law Society of Namibia’s Human Rights Excellence award.
She was part of the team that set up the UNAM Legal Aid Clinic, which she says was largely modelled on the UWC Law Clinic. While lecturing (and acting as supervising attorney of the Law Clinic), she was also a regular presenter on an interactive current aff airs programme called Dialogue, which was a UNAM-Namibian Broadcasting Corporation initiative.
Yvonne won the CEO Global 2015 Africa’s Most Infl uential Women in Business and Government Award in recognition of her work in the education and training sector. In the same year, she accepted her appointment as the Chair of the Namibian Law Reform and Development Commission, partly because she wanted a break from teaching and partly because “you don’t say no to a sitting President!”
Yvonne cites the publication of a peerreviewed book celebrating 25 years of the Commission’s existence, the development of a rapport with the public and nationwide consultations on economic empowerment as the highlights of her tenure.
Her return to academia was put on hold when President Hage Geingob appointed her as Namibia’s Minister of Justice in 2020. Her main priorities as Minister are to improve the effi ciency of all aspects of the judicial system and to increase access to the courts for poorer citizens and people with disabilities.
The child born into poverty in Katutura finally has what she dreamt of, the means to ensure that the law is used to enhance social justice.
