RUNDU – Deputy Prime Minister, Marco Hausiku, launched a much awaited report on social issues affecting the Kavango East and West regions last week.
The report comes in the wake of the conference that was held at Kamutjonga in the Mukwe constituency in January last year, where leaders of the two regions had discussions on key issues affecting the two regions. The report summarises the issues which formed the basis of the discussions during the Kamutjonga joint regional conference and highlights issues such as teenage pregnancy, malnutrition and the role of traditional leaders in nation building.
The two regions are grappling with serious social challenges and that is why the regional government and traditional leaders saw the need to examine the factors that contribute to the problems. The conference also discussed the high rate of malnutrition in the two regions and made recommendations to deal with the problem. The report further examined the role of traditional leaders in the two regions and how to harmonize their roles with the roles of government leaders and to that effect recommended a road map on the way forward. “There comes a time in the history of a nation, community or society when people are confronted with a life threatening crisis and it is during such times that it is expected for leaders to take decisive action. The Kamutjonga conference was preceded by reports that painted a dismal piture of the social situation in both regions. This social crisis prompted our national leaders to come up with the Kamutjonga conference in an attempt to address the issues. Moreover, the conference was an inclusive exercise,” Kavango East Governor, Ambassor Dr Samuel Mbambo, said during the launch of the report.
Speaking at the same occasion Deputy Prime Minister, Marco Hausiku, urged the people of the two regions to work together in confronting the existing social and economic challenges. “We have agreed that the report be launched formally in order to start working.” The deputy minister was also pleased with the attendance of the conference and the depth of the discussions, which had a comprehensive scope. “But let me tell you what is important that I want you to know and why were are in such a hurry to launch the report. During the conference we agreed that the report should be launched in April in order to start working. The intention of that agreement was that this type of a problem can only be solved by an inclusive type of campaign, because the problems revealed in our discussions were so broad and so inclusive right from the mother to the father,” he said. “So everybody had a stake, even the shebeen owners were represented,” Hausiku said. “We also agreed that there might be mistakes in the report both language-wise and content-wise, but we have decided that as we go on we are going to improve on the report, but we have to launch it. We have to tell the people that the meeting we had in Kamutjonga has produced this result and that this result requires us to have an action plan that will include everybody for us to be able to make our people aware that we are not only faced with other dangers that we know, there is this underground danger (sic),” Hausiku said.
By John Muyamba