In The Name of Swapo

SWAPOS LEADERSHIP CONTINUES to deny that the party received any Fishrot money, but theres no getting away from the fact that corrupt deals were engineered in its name.

The issue now really is what action the Swapo leadership has taken to ensure that individuals no longer find the ruling party an easy vehicle for the kind of grand corruption that is unfolding in the Fishrot case.

Tomorrow, 13 November, is the second anniversary since The Namibian and its news media partners around the world (WikiLeaks, Al Jazeera and Icelandic newspapers and television) first carried exposés of arguably the biggest corruption scheme in independent Namibia, aka the Fishrot scandal.

We have struggled to find any substantive changes made by Swapo and the government that it controls to close the loopholes that allowed such blatant corruption to flourish across several sectors in the country.

Calls to overhaul the allocation of fishing licences and quotas have been ignored, to the extent that the government this year again dished out one of Namibias most precious public resources to relatives and cronies of Swapos top leaders.

Apparently not even the bankable evidence that putting up the fish quotas to public bid tender will pump more money directly into tax revenue can convince the government leaders to scrap the blatant systemic corruption thats embedded.

Auctioning only a tiny portion (perhaps less than 5%) of this years fish quotas landed more than N$400 million for the national tax coffers. Up until the Fishrot exposé, every year for more than a decade, the national budget drew a measly N$150 million a year, every year, from fisheries in levies and related fees.

The only rationale any reasonably minded person can see for the refusal to overhaul the system is that individuals who have been lining their pockets with undeserved public resources are not willing to change their ways in order to benefit the broader public.

Instead they want to keep hold of the land, fisheries, mining and other resources and then only after they have bought themselves luxurious cars and taken expensive vacations, do they provide handouts, especially to voters in rural areas.

The Fishrot case unfolding in the Namibian courts suggests that if the government had undertaken effective lifestyle audits, grand corruption such as took place at the state-owned Fishcor, would have been detected earlier.

Schemers would have little room to engage in financial engineering as the detained Fishcor ex-CEO arrogantly told the court in an attempt to obscure the flow of money that state prosecutors said came from fishing quotas that should not have been issued.

The so-called governmental objectives are now synonymous with state-sanctioned corruption, for instance where Fishcor was to arrange that more than N$70 million would have gone to Swapo, though its believed most of the money ended up elsewhere and only indirectly contributed to the ruling partys dubious activities.

Small wonder the Namibian government has ignored calls to beef up its anti-corruption machinery.

The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) barely has funds to investigate and successfully prosecute a myriad of cases.

From day one, what was supposed to be Namibias premier graft-busting institution, has been a ghost of what it should have been.

Instead, the ruling party bulldozed the reappointment of Paulus Noa, whose main legacy for the ACC is incompetence among its staff, and flops in cases such as that of parliamentarian Tobie Aupindi and Teko Trading of the Chinese customs scanners, among the more obvious examples.

Is Swapo, its ordinary members and its leaders comfortable that the theft of public resources continues to be undertaken in their name?