Keetmanshoop
Three teenage boys sit around a fire at the Karasburg dumpsite, surrounded by broken beer and cooldrink bottles, empty tins, and other rubbish. On the fire is a pot with some eggs and tomatoes. They say this is their lunch for the day.
Although it is considered a dumping ground by many, for some it is a pot of gold, as they visit the area regularly hoping to get a nugget of something useful to sell or to fill their empty bellies.
The boys, aged between 10 and 11, told New Era that they usually leave their pot at the dumpsite when they return to their houses, so that when hunger strikes they can always come to the dumpsite to find food and cook. They also collect plastics, which they use as fuel to keep warm during the harsh winter.
This is a situation that Minister of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare Zephania Kameeta says is one of his ministry’s key aims to prevent and overcome. Hence, spirited efforts are needed to establish food banks countrywide.
But his task of tackling poverty is being made increasingly difficult by greedy individuals that want to get rich quickly at the expense of the country’s poor, Kameeta told the seventh Congress of Associations of Regional Councils at Keetmanshoop last week.
He said government has good plans and strategies to eradicate poverty and develop Namibia as a country, but the plans are only on paper and are not fully implemented, citing corruption and greed as the main reasons that things are never implemented as planned.
“In the more than one year that I’ve been in government I’ve seen clearly how corruption is so rife in this country,” he said. He used as an example the proposed new parliament building, saying the initial cost amounted to some N$800 million and he simply does not understand how the price could have shot up to more than N$2 billion, as reported in the press.
He further noted that Namibia cannot prosper as a country if some people only think of how to enrich themselves, saying prosperity can only be achieved once all individuals serve the people of the country selflessly.
He said currently there is so much greed and selfishness and people who are supposed to serve the public are busy planning in secret how they can personally benefit from the millions government plans to spend, before it even reaches those in need and this causes endless delays in the implementation of government welfare programmes.
“Then we talk of bureaucracy, it’s not bureaucracy. It’s a deliberate delay” by those who want to benefit and enrich themselves at the public’s expense, he noted.
With the launch of the planned food bank in the capital fast approaching, there is hope that teenagers like the ones on the dumpsite in Karasburg will get healthy food whenever they are hungry and need no longer go to the dumpsite to forage for scraps of food.