By: Selma Taapopi
The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) indicated that they have a backlog of 229 cases from 2021/2022 in Khomas region which were carried over to the current financial year.
The commission explained that cases were carried over due to the lack of specialised investigators and delays from third parties refusing to share the necessary information.
ACC acting head of investigations, Justine Kanyangela highlighted the challenges affecting the investigations and the finalisation of cases during the official inaugural meeting of the khomas regional anti-corruption forum.
"The Commission is not decentralised to all 14 regions and this makes it difficult. Investigators have to travel long distances in order to conduct investigations all over the country. High staff turnover leads to cases piling up and shortage of investigators specialised to investigate the corruption cases within the country as some of the corruption cases are of a complex nature. Currently, the ratio to the population is roughly 101, 600 per investigator," noted Kanyangela.
Khomas regional governor Laura McLeod-Katjirua stated that corruption has a negative impact on good governance and development. McLeod-Katjirua added that the reported corruption cases should motivate Namibians to be active watchdogs that can help to progressively root out corruption.
"Let us courageously confront and expose corruption without fear or favour, to save our nation, we must break the silence, stop the blame game and vacate the observer seat and please remember that the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil but equally by those who watch them without doing anything,"McLeod-Katjirua remarked.
The Chief Regional Officer at the Khomas Regional Council , Clement Mafwila, said years of effort to combat corruption through policies has helped to minimise internally driven misconduct.
"Most organisations experiencing fraud and corruption reported that the most disruptive incident came via external attack, isn't it? I think the Anti Corruption Commission will agree with me on that one. It's no longer the internal control that we are dealing with but we've got emerging threats as we are talking about now, meaning we are talking about Cyber crime. We might not have been prepared for it, it's part of corruption. I mean that despite our control to make sure that nobody steals the money in here, there are others that we do not have control over,'' he said. For 2021/2022 the Khomas region ACC office in Khomas has so far received 58 reports of alleged corrupt practices of which 36 were dealt with while 22 were carried over to the 2022/2023 financial year.