THERE was a time, not too long ago, whenever an organisation was running a competition where prizes were to be won [even small ones like a packet of sweets, drinks and cash] it came with an announcement along these lines: “employees and their relatives may not enter”.
That was the time when many of us not schooled in corporate language would not have understood someone talking about “conflict of interest”. But so clear was the field of play that anyone would have understood the intent of such a decision. Ethics. Moral fortitude. Managing that thin line between perception and reality.
How times have changed.
Readers may have picked up several instances pointing to a turn for the worse in our country. We will highlight one or two that suggest that leaders have simply decided to show the public the middle finger. Not even the devil cares anymore.
One of the incidents is a report in this newspaper last week about a senior manager at the Roads Authority, the Namibian parastatal that issues multi-billion dollar contracts for the building, maintenance and repair of our good road system. The company brazenly confirmed that its industrial relations manager, Frederic Dausab, had won contracts worth more than N$16 million to maintain roads.
The Roads Authority’s public relations office went further to insist that there was nothing wrong with that picture. After all, they said, Dausab had declared his interests, had the approval of the chief executive officer and thus he had no special advantage when competing against others. Hard to believe!
The RA must think the public is blind, deaf and, above all, clueless not to see that picture and imagine that Dausab hasn’t had first-hand access to bidding records, the rules, and other useful information and then the daily contact with the people who award the contracts.
Another devil-may-care example is the case of the deputy director of education for the Oshikoto region, Vilho Shipuata, who a couple of weeks ago bluntly told this newspaper that more than 100 children who are HIV positive and attend the Waapandula Primary School will not be given food until they have discovered why the school’s management “leaked” information about the closure of the feeding scheme.
The feeding scheme has not been running this year and the children cannot, as a result, take their anti-retroviral medication properly. For Shipuata, starving the children is seemingly a good weapon to use to force the school principal and his teachers to tell him why they dared speak to the media.
The fact that dozens of vulnerable orphans were not receiving food could hardly qualify as classified information. The school’s management did not disclose what Shipuata and his colleagues at the regional level did not already know.
The most shocking issue in both these cases is that the people in power have condoned wrong-doing.
The head office of the Ministry of Education should take steps to ensure that Shipuata’s stance is not encouraged in our democratic country where freedom of information and free speech is a constitutional guarantee that not even parliament can take away. In fact, Shipuata and his team must be punished for their incompetence and failure to deliver the food.
Similarly, in the case of the Roads Authority, it is preposterous that managers are allowed to be both employees and clients of the parastatal. Dausab would no doubt have been emboldened by many similar instances across central government where permanent secretaries, commissioners at different institutions and directors own and run companies that compete for government work, earning more than what the state pays them to ensure that those jobs are allocated to the private sector for implementation.
The Anti-Corruption Commission, the Office of the Ombudsman and parliament must act with honesty and publicly to root out the cancerous spread of lack of ethics and morality.
Without instilling ethics we can forget about building the country. Ethical and moral bankruptcy, which equates a devil-may-care attitude, is our guarantee to ruin. Our children and future generations have not done anything to deserve that. Let us not have them suffer for the sins of their parents. The devil must be forced to care.
