Hanse-Himarwa not incriminated by third witness

THE state’;s third witness in the corruption trial of education minister Katrina Hanse-Himarwa said in the Windhoek High Court yesterday that he only heard after the fact about changes made to a list of people who were to receive houses from the mass housing programme at Mariental.

Testifying before judge Christie Liebenberg on the second day of Hanse-Himarwa’;s trial, Nestor Nghufeilimwe told the judge he was part of a team of officials from the former Ministry of Regional and Local Government, Housing and Rural Development that visited Mariental in December 2014 to verify a list of 19 mass housing programme beneficiaries who were due to receive newly built houses at the Hardap region town.

Having verified the list by comparing it to a waiting list containing the names of people who had applied for housing at Mariental, the team of officials gave the list of 19 names to the town’;s local authority councillors, who were then due to have a meeting with the regional governor, Hanse-Himarwa, to brief her, Nghufeilimwe recounted.

He said he did not know if the list of beneficiaries was indeed presented to Hanse-Himarwa, adding that he only heard after he and his colleagues had returned to Windhoek that not all of the people whose names had been on the list had received houses at a handover ceremony on 17 December 2014, as two of the names that had initially been on the list were removed before the ceremony.

Hanse-Himarwa is being prosecuted on a charge of corruptly using her former office as governor of the Hardap region to obtain gratification for herself or another person. She denied guilt on the charge at the start of her trial on Monday.

The charge is based on allegations that Hanse-Himarwa in December 2014 interfered in the allocation of houses that the government built at Mariental by having two people taken off the list of beneficiaries of the housing project, and having them replaced by two of her relatives – her sister-in-law and a granddaughter of a sister of her mother.

The prosecution’;s second witness in the trial, Ministry of Urban and Rural Development accountant Cassius Ndisiro, was also part of the team of officials that visited Mariental before the planned handover ceremony. He testified on Monday that a list of the 19 people who were allocated the first batch of houses completed under the mass housing programme was given to the chief executive officer of the Mariental Municipality, Paul Nghiwilepo, who after that had a meeting with Hanse-Himarwa as regional governor.

Following that meeting, Nghiwilepo reported that Hanse-Himarwa had removed two of the names on the list, Ndisiro said in the first part of his testimony. However, under cross-examination by defence lawyer Sisa Namandje, he said he was not told who removed the names from the list, and did not know who took the names off the list.

Ndisiro’;s testimony ended on the same note yesterday, with him saying that when Nghiwilepo briefed the team of ministry officials after the meeting with Hanse-Himarwa, he said two names had been removed from the list of beneficiaries and replaced with two other names, without mentioning who had taken the two names off the list.

The trial is scheduled to continue today.

Prosecutors Salomon Kanyemba and Constance Moyo are representing the state.

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