WINDHOEK – Former police officer Lukato Martin Lukato, the only member consistently associated with the National Democratic Party (NDP), is back with appeals for donations and demands for the country’s electoral laws to be amended to allow all registered political parties to receive a monthly fee from the National Assembly.
Without a seat in either Parliament or any local authority council, NDP is hardly out of its infancy but its leader Lukato is refusing to throw in the proverbial towel as he continues to demand amendments that he believes could tilt the dwindling political fortunes of his uncharted party in its favour.
With only six comments on his party’s statement posted on Facebook on February 4 regarding the party’s planned activities for the year, Lukato told New Era that news be put out of his call – which has seemingly landed on deaf ears so far – that laws be changed to financially benefit all registered parties.
When registered, parties are representing aspirations of Namibians who support them, hence the need to help them advance their cause, argued the resilient journeyman.
Sixteen years since NDP was established on 9 February 2003, Lukato has maintained a firm grip on its presidency, with very little known about who else is in the party’s leadership. Lukato has often argued that the party would fall like a rock if he left its presidency.
This, he often says, is because he is the sole benefactor of the party. He sustains the little formation through surplus from his subsistence cultivations and sometimes gets free hike in haulage trucks to make it to Windhoek to engage his opposition peers and electoral authorities.
Yesterday, he told New Era he remains the only source of his party’s shoestring financial injection, and called for bleeding-hearted individuals and institutions to make donations to NDP.
He promised, in his statement, not to reveal the identities of his benefactors.
“Your identity or your name will not be revealed to a person but it will be kept secret,” vowed the former apartheid regime police officer, who was incorporated into the Namibian police after independence before he quit to try his luck at mainstream politics, for which he remains at the periphery.
With this donation, Lukato aims to squeeze answers from both the National Assembly and the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN), from whom he has been waiting for a response on funding for four years.
If the silence from these bodies persists, Lukato vowed to approach Sadc, the African Union, the United Nations and even the International Court of Justice in The Hague over the matter.