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Topic Discussion IV
Achieving Good Governance
Controlling Corruption, Improving
Administration
and Strengthening the Rule of Law
Room 1
(6 of 22 pages)
Perhaps at this junction I should mentioned that our Deputy Minister Trade, the
Honorable Oso Essau (ph) is the vice chairman of our Public Accounts Committee. Naturally a Public Accounts Committee
is chaired by a member of the opposition. Now, he's from the ruling party, but the chairman is from the opposition
party.
Then I must mention that we, three or four years ago, although corruption is not rampant in Namibia, as it might
be in some other places, we thought it wise already at this stage of our development, to address the issue of corruption
pertinently. To this effect our government or that is, rather, the Cabinet, appointed a committee or a commission
to look into the whole spectrum of corruption, it's manifestations, reasons for being around and even what could
be done to combat our corruption. And we have been working very closely with Transparency International and some
other bodies and I had the privilege of also serving on this body.
Now, one of the key things that flew out of this is that the government said in order to fight corruption, we should
start with ourselves. So there is a bill being prepared for politicians, particularly those in parliament, to declare
their private assets. So there should be a register where the moment you are appointed to Parliament, you declare
all your assets, what you have and what you don't have, so that in a period of one year, if you then accumulate
more than is reasonably expected from your salary, then obviously you will have some explanation to do. I must
say that in our neighboring country, South Africa, they have already adopted this as a law, in that there is already
a private register and this mechanism is already at work.
So apart from -- I think I should also mention that this corruption commission that was established, it was not
only government officials that were serving on it, but we had really the broad society participating, the private
sector, the civil society and everybody, because we say, it takes two to tango. It takes -- people always tend
to think it's only government officials who are corrupt, but they must be corrupted by somebody and in most cases,
of course, it's those people with money and they are in the private sector. So we try to work hand in hand with
the private sector and the civil society to come up with broad recommendations and to this end, we had what was
called a National Consolidative Conference on the Prevention of Corruption, out of which quite a number of broad
recommendations flew and we are therefore in the process of also fighting corruption before it really becomes part
of our culture, as it is in some countries.
Maybe at this junction I should stop here and if there are questions, we can take up many of these issues that
I have set up here.
Perhaps one last thing to mention is that as an Auditor General, one cannot wait in isolation and therefore we
or at least my office, we are a member of some regional organizations of Auditor Generals. We belong to the Commonwealth
Auditor Generals Organization and we are a member of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions,
which is an organization to which all the Auditor Generals in the world belong and we are talking about a membership
of some 173 countries. So we regularly exchange ideas through conferences, correspondences and so on, just to know
what the other guys are doing, their problems and their achievements and so on.
But I think for the moment I will pause here and then we can take it up during discussion time. Thank you.
Chair: Thank you, Dr. Tjingaete, for that very interesting sharing of experiences of being the Auditor General
in Namibia and in particular, I think sharing the efforts of the government to try to combat corruption, starting
with the government officials. I hope you have some success in getting that measure passed by Parliament.
