Rudolf Gaiseb
Anti-Corruption Commission of Namibia director general Paulus Noa has slammed the recently-released corruption survey findings, saying they are not premised on facts.
“The researchers consulted people on the street. They did not collect factual data to justify their findings. It is merely a perception. Corruption in Namibia has not increased,” Noa said.
The commission, government and various sectors of society have made efforts to fight corruption in Namibia, he said.
“What we receive today are fewer offences or allegations of corruption than we used to receive in the past,” he said.
Noa added: “If you are consulting a person on the street who is challenged by the livelihood situation, an unemployed person may perceive that the reason for the problem is corruption, which is not the case. Economic performance, unemployment and the poverty rate are not attributed to corruption. They do not necessarily occur because of corruption.
There is poverty in the country, and we find ourselves in these unsolicited living conditions, but that does not mean that it is because of corruption.”
Noa continued suggesting the findings could be politically-motivated.
“These people, when they want to damage the immediate government, they always go for pure perceptions. Corruption has not increased,” he charged.
What is more worrying is that they were never approached for input.
“They did not approach the ACC, the police, the financial intelligence centre,
or the regulatory authorities like the Bank of Namibia. I dismiss it. There is no truth in their report,” Noa said.
According to the Afrobarometer report, 65% of the populace believe that corruption in the country increased “somewhat” or “a lot” during the year preceding the survey.
Perceptions of increasing corruption rise dramatically with citizens’ experiences of lived poverty, ranging from 56% among respondents experiencing no or low lived poverty to 72%–73% among those experiencing moderate or high lived poverty, the report said.
About 76% of citizens say the government is doing a bad job in fighting corruption in government, the highest level of disapproval recorded in two decades of Afrobarometer surveys.
“The Afrobarometer team in Namibia, led by Survey Warehouse, interviewed a nationally-representative sample of 1 200 adult Namibians in March 2024.
A sample of this size yields country-level results with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points at a 95% confidence level,” Christiaan Keulder, a national investigator for the Afrobarometer in Namibia said.
More so, “a new Afrobarometer study also illustrates that two-thirds of Namibians say corruption in the country is getting worse. This share has decreased significantly in recent years, a new Afrobarometer survey indicates,” he added.
Furthermore, a majority of Namibians believe that at least “some” members and representatives of central, regional and local government as well as State offices, civil society and businesses are involved
in corruption. “About three-quarters (76%) of citizens say the government is doing a bad job of fighting corruption in government, the highest level of disapproval recorded in two decades of Afrobarometer surveys,” Keulder added.
Anti-Corruption
Yesterday, the continent celebrated African Anti-Corruption Day.
The day was celebrated under the ‘Effective Whistleblowers Protection Mechanism: A Critical Tool in the Fight Against Corruption’. Reflecting on the day, Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) executive director Graham Hopwood called on government to operationalise the Whistleblower Act without delay.
“In view of this, the IPPR, through its Integrity Namibia project, calls on the government to urgently operationalise the Whistleblower Protection Act, which was passed in 2017. Seven years later, this crucial law remains unimplemented, demonstrating a lack of political will to fight corruption,” Hopwood said.
He then moved to touch on Afrobarometer’s corruption index.
“The recently- released Afrobarometer findings on corruption in Namibia found that since 2017, more than six in 10 Namibians consistently report that ordinary people risk retaliation or other negative consequences if they report corruption. This demonstrates the urgent need to set up the Whistleblower Protection Office as soon as possible,” he said.
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