Striking A Balance In Swakop

WHAT’s wrong with Swakopmund’s ratepayers and their elected representatives and municipal management to continuously end up on the wrong side of every shortcut attempt of self-enrichment at the cost of the community? Naivety, stupidity, greed? We’ve certainly had more than our fair share of attempts to sail around entrenched safeguards and regulations for the prevention of just such eventualities it in the past. Need we mention the waterfront, municipal swimming pool, golf course on the bathing beach, etc.?

Enter the latest, the Strand Hotel, saga. Starting as a concessionary, Strand Café progressed into a (at the time reluctantly granted) privately owned hotel. Made possible at the time through concessions to serve the Mole beach bathers and owned then by one of the oldest and most respected public companies in Namibia. Which is now under new management I believe, which is definitely showing. What started off as a simple decision to renew and modernise what was slowly becoming a somewhat timeworn and dilapidated hotel, soon had all the classic symptoms of a mother of all shenanigans. Straight out of the starting blocks the public was confronted with the fait accompli of a huge slice of additional public property that had been sold without going out on tender. To accommodate the to-be-rebuilt hotel. That in itself should have set all alarm bells ringing, which however were initially dimmed by the impeccable past reputation of the company in question. As was, what was soon to be laid bare as a farce, the customary and compulsory presentation of future plans for public approval to an only half-informed public.Of course this was only the prelude to what was still in the pipeline. Such as conjuring every trick in the book to avoid fair competition as would normally be customary, nay compulsory, in decisions of this nature. Nor did it take long for the hotel sketch plans, submitted previously for approval to an unsuspecting public, to be withdrawn again. And for the real issue to surface. Of course, only after the demolition work had been concluded to manifest the dictum of ‘too far advanced to be stopped’. Then it suddenly transpired that a hotel was only the crumbs of a much bigger cake. The former public property, turned private for general public usage, was to be turned into private property of a quasi flat development on prime public soil. A flat development that would clash head-on with the hustle and bustle of a public bathing beach, probably killing both in the long run. And to add insult to injury, the bulk to be sold upfront before any of their own funds were to be employed. How’s that for having and eating the cake? What a way to show your public spiritedness and ethical business acumen.In short, the developers called in by our local corporate stalwart as front-men had, at least to my mind, no compunction whatsoever to surreptitiously attempt to turn Swakopmund’s pride and joy into a proven Langstrand-like development disaster for their own gain. My humble suggestion to Swakopmund’s ratepayers and management alike would be for the Swakopmund municipality to renegotiate the terms and conditions regarding the usage of the land in question with the present owners. On the grounds of, in my mind, gross misrepresentation of intent and purpose by the owners. In order to re-establish a clear set of directives regarding sustainable usage, to obtain the best possible balance between private and communal interests by consensus with all interested parties. Ernst KeibelSwakopmund