As a draft drug bill makes its way towards Parliament, a request for public hearings says something about how a community keeps its voice.
By Krisztián Galánthai Fekete
Where a law meets the people
A law starts as a draft on someone’s desk and becomes law in a chamber. After that it travels. It turns up in kitchens and clinics, in courtrooms and classrooms, and on the street, among people who were mostly not there when the wording was settled. The public hearing is one of the few places where those people and that wording can meet before the ink is dry.
What was asked for
A staff report in this newspaper on 6 November carried the headline “Ganja users urge Parliament to protect constitutional rights”. It was about a media release from Ganja Users of Namibia, issued after Cabinet approved the Combating of Narcotics, Psychoactive Drugs and Substances Bill 2026 in principle and authorised public consultation on it. What the group asks for is easy to state: open, transparent public hearings, so that community members, public health practitioners, legal advocates and affected people can each make a formal submission.
Readers will hold very different views on the bill itself, and Namibians will argue those views out in Parliament and perhaps in the courts. This column takes no position on it. Its subject is narrower: the request to be heard, which any group, on any side of any question, might make.
A promise, not only a demand
Asking to be heard can sound like a demand on other people. Look closer and it is also a promise from the person asking. Somebody has to write the submission. Before that, somebody has to read the draft, slowly, clauses they would rather skip included. Then they attend, wait their turn, keep to the time allowed, and sit through a neighbour who sees it the other way round. The hardest part comes last. The decision may go against them, and they still share a town with the neighbours who got the outcome they wanted.
The small duties that keep a place
That is ordinary work, and a place stays itself through it. A community is shaped by its large decisions, yet it is kept by small duties carried out when looking away would be easier. Every town has people who do them. Someone checks on the neighbour who lives alone. Someone keeps the minutes of the committee meeting accurately, even when the meeting was dull. Someone reads the notice on the board and tells others it is there. None of them holds high office. Without them, the large decisions would fall on a place that had lost track of its own people.
Hearings worth attending
Public hearings belong to the same family of duties. They work when people arrive prepared, and when those who listen are willing to be moved by what they hear, at least a little. A hearing attended only by those already certain of the answer becomes a ceremony. One where different voices meet, and are recorded, gives lawmakers something they cannot find at a desk: a sense of how a law will feel where it lands.
There is a quiet dignity in asking for that. The request assumes that the people affected by a law have something worth saying, and that Parliament is willing to hear it. Those two assumptions sit at the heart of any public consultation, whoever makes the request and whatever the bill finally says.
Deciding the smaller things
Parliament will decide what the bill becomes. Before and after that vote, people across the Zambezi Region and the whole country will go on deciding smaller things: whether to read the draft, whether to write the submission, whether to listen to the person across the room.
To ask to be heard is to accept a duty. A place remains itself when enough of its people accept it.
Krisztián Galánthai Fekete, PhD, writes about meaning, character and small daily practices. He works in software automation as an integration engineer, where he sees every day how fast AI is changing work, and what people need beyond new skills to keep their footing. In Mozambique he started a school that grew from 25 to 100 pupils in a few months. His book Find Your Meaning in 60 Days, In the Age of AI and Robotics has been published in English, German, French, Italian and Portuguese, and a Hungarian edition is in progress. drfekete.com · book.drfekete.com
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