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The definition of Festival in the Queen's tongue means a day or period of celebration for religious reasons, or an organised series of concerts, films, etc, typically one held annually in the same place.

Revellers at the annual Copper Festival in Tsumeb have surely taken note and have made it their sole beat to celebrate this yearly event in great style, and the folks are always dressed to kill, kitted out in their eye-catching attire, and Oh Boy! The "Haya water of Moag" (Tswala in street lingo), has become the in-thing at this supposedly august gathering.
The Copper town of Tsumeb almost burst its seams, as people from all walks of life descended in droves at this usually laid-back mine town to have a whale of a time.
Hordes of young people came from all over the country - putting big smiles on the faces of the seemingly clueless organisers who were thumping their chests with a great measure of pride for having put up a near faultless festival. What was meant to be an ideal opportunity for the town's inhabitants and other upcoming entrepreneurs to market their products was turned into a free flow of drunken activities and a kind of a music festival, so to speak. Revellers were barely interested in popping in at the few stalls that were clearly dwarfed by the makeshift waterholes (pubs) where booze was flowing freely in terms of attraction.

Those who control the purse strings of the Local Organising Committee (LOC) were in seventh heaven. Our learned friends were clearly blinded by the swelling crowd, mostly unemployed youngsters, who flocked into the Copper town in large numbers to vent their frustrations by tackling various brands of booze in a fashion that would have left a seasoned English bartender green with envy.

There is an urgent need to reshape the approach towards the staging of the Copper Festival and that should start with the change of name, since in many people's minds, the word festival is interpreted as a gateway to the excessive indulgence in booze, sex hunting and other unrelated activities. Modern children are growing up in a world that is producing volumes of information that confuses most average adults.

Unlike the societies of our ancestors, the present generation of adults has hardly any time to sift through the constant flood of information so as to produce a culture that they can pass on to the new generation.

Indeed, we have an ironic situation in which young people in modern times are rather busy developing their own culture, the culture of tackling booze at the slightest provocation.Young people find adults to be at odds in not enthusiastically embracing the various new cultures that have speedily crippled the moral fabric within our population. Of course, young people do not have enough experience to know the eventual dehumanising aspects of some of these new cultures.

The Copper Festival is becoming a time bomb, unless those at the helm start realising that incidents are channels through which people learn very important lessons. As it stands, the chief beneficiaries from this well-meant initiative have unintentionally become those streetwise dudes in the more lucrative business of dispensing hot stuff and food. Organisers of the annual Copper Festival need to change their mindset and overhaul their entire approach towards this august event.
There are hopelessly too many entertainment activities on the menu that have the potential to upstage the ultimate togetherness of the event.
Witnessing a dozen foreign tourists strolling casually in and out of empty exhibition stalls for some kind of window shopping was an eyesore experience, while our own people seem to be more attracted to the sound of loud music that was blaring freely through the air in the open space of the matchbox public park.

Unlike the annual Windhoek show, where masses of visitors pay entrance fees, the Copper Festival does not have such facilities and one just fails to digest the seemingly unending bragging by organisers about the huge numbers of visitors at the gathering instead of focusing on deliverables. While it was a great idea to add some spice to the event through the hosting of a football tournament for "Golden Oldies", the organisers could have done better by staging matches at a more suitable and accessible venue for spectators.
Remember, these footballers are role models and to expose them to such mediocre playing conditions shows a total lack of respect for them. The format of the tournament also needs to be revisited so as to allow teams to play on a round robin basis that would allow football fans ample time to watch their favourite players in action.