FOR ardent followers of New Era’s court and crime stories it will be clear that this reporter does not use this platform to talk about things that bother him or that he finds necessary to talk about.
For those instances he has a few good friends who are always willing to lend an ear.
But when your big boss tells you write an ‘Eewa’ for this week, well you have to obey.
So after receiving the “assignment”, for a lack of a better word, I racked my brains to come up with a topic that would hopefully appease you Vafyoonas (read in Mbumba’s voice).
I even went to the extent of asking my competitor and hopefully still good friend Werner Menges for a topic.
True to himself, Menges who has the somewhat dubious distinction of being ‘thee Court Reporter’ told me to write about the fact that after 25 years of freedom Namibia is still being dubbed as the country with the most violent crimes in a domestic setting compared to other countries whose one city will swallow our entire population.
So here goes: I may have a blonde moment, but since I can recall there was never before in our country’s history this magnitude of rapes, murders and vicious assaults on the so-called vulnerable members of society, meaning women and children and not to say that some men also resort under that group.
I vividly remember as a young and handsome freelance reporter, minus the ‘afdak’ ( beer belly), for an opposition paper in the early nineties, just after independence, that I covered a story about a man who was sentenced to 40 years in jail for the brutal rape and attempted murder of a pregnant young girl in the then Lüderitz, don’t know if the town will still be called that after the independence celebrations and the ushering in of a new era for Namibia.
But I am veering off.
In that case Judge Brian O’Linn as he then was, observed that strict measures must be put in place to curb the “pandemic” as he called domestic violence.
While that case did not fall into the category of domestic violence as the perpetrator ambushed the victim on her way back from the white part of town to the location, he still felt that it was a scourge that needed to be tackled with immediate effect.
Well 25 years later we have the Domestic Violence Act and lengthier custodial sentences for convicts of such heinous acts.
We had the national prayer day against gender based violence that was attended by thousands upon thousands of peace-loving Namibians and calls from national leaders for Namibians – who are generally seen as peace loving – to put an end to this brutal act.
But to no avail.
It seems that some Namibian men and women for that matter think that they own their partners once the yes word was given.