Guest Perspective

A COLUMN by Nic Borain on parent24.com recently made me wonder a bit. He was confronted by his (white) son and (black) friend as to who he supported during apartheid.

It made me think about what I would reply if, say 20 years from now, my child would ask me what I did against the rampant fraud and corruption, misuse of power, abuse of position, as well as the spread of hate speech and intolerance. At the rate our resources are being plundered right now we will probably then be sitting in a refugee camp somewhere!Do we exercise our rights and call the President to order and demand answers on the blatant corruption in his kleptocratic administration? There has been only silence from State House on the issue of Chinese bursaries for the elite, including the President’s own daughter. Those who attempted to shed light on the matter (like the Permanent Secretary of Education) only managed to confuse us more. So, I ask: Is the President corrupt? I actually contemplated saying that he is, but that would be stooping to the level of the ruling party with their name-calling and diverting the attention from the real issues. He has, after all, cast a blind eye on other big cases of mismanagement or theft of public funds. Is the President’s silence on the bursary matter a sign of his discomfort with himself or is his office trying to construct an argument so comprehensive that it will answer all our questions about the man and his (mal)administration? Why are they taking over two weeks to construct a response to the muted public outcry? I understand Government will make a statement on the issue on Monday – more than two weeks after the President was implicated in what appears to be an unethical, probably illegal, greasing of palms.Here are some of the options on what they were supposed to say on the day the story broke in Informanté:1. No, the President’s daughter did not get a Chinese bursary. Here are the documents to prove that the President is paying for her. 2. Yes, the President’s daughter was offered a bursary by the Chinese and he accepted. The President is sorry, it was wrong, but it looked like a perfectly good thing to do at the time. 3. Yes, the President’s daughter did get a Chinese bursary but they assured him that they would not come knocking on his door for any further favours (and that there are no strings attached!).Somehow number 3 sounds very weak.Do the Namibian people suffer as a result of the administration’s generosity towards the Chinese people? Absolutely! Why in heaven’s name are our builders paid N$3 per hour by the Chinese building contractors while the labour law states that they must be paid over N$9? Why has no Chinese contractor been arrested for this breach of our laws? They have been paying slave wages for years. Why are they getting all the Government building contracts? Is it because they dish out scholarships to the offspring of the decision-makers? How would you otherwise phrase my question if he agreed to a scholarship from a government whose corporations have benefited excessively from contracts dished out by the administration and has unlimited access to decision-makers in his administration? The President is not a poor man. He makes a cool million a year, tax free. His wife gets an allowance and they, unlike the occupants of the White House, do not have to buy their own groceries. The President is set up for life. If he quits this gig, willingly or otherwise, he gets an allowance for the rest of his life. And so he should. He is our President and we should make sure that our public figures do not fall from grace when they leave public office. I hope the President feels hard enough done by that he comes out and says something himself and doesn’t just send another government official who will not have all the information and will just confuse us even more. Is the President’s moral compass switched off? Was his bleating about zero tolerance for corruption just that? Is he not worried what the people who voted for him think of him and his honesty?No one could be satisfied with the status quo. It is time someone comes out and say, ‘We are sorry. This was wrong.’ It would be most fitting if this could be the President himself.