The house that Hendrina Haufiku built

NOT only has she lost a house, investments she made in home improvements, the opportunity to generate an additional income and her furniture, but her children are now scattered among family and friends.

This is the tale of a Walvis Bay single mother who has been paying for a house that was not registered in her name, but in the name of her estranged husband. ‘I want my house back,’ sobbed Hendrina Haufiku (36) over a table strewn with papers detailing the loss of the property at the beginning of the year. ‘I cry every day; even my mother cannot stop crying every time I speak to her over the phone.’ Haufiku lost the house after the High Court on October 26, 2010 issued a warrant of execution on movable goods belonging to her estranged husband, Bonifacius Kalute, to raise N$48 187,81 for the repayment of a car loan to FNB Namibia. The house, bought through the National Housing Enterprise (NHE) in 1999, was registered in Kalute’s name. The NHE financed the transaction with N$34 350 to be paid off over 180 months. This means that over the 13 years, about 156 months were paid off. Had all instalments been paid without any arrears, the house would been fully paid over 24 months or two years.Haufiku said she had one year left to pay off N$10 000 on the house, but the house was auctioned off on January 27, and, according to Haufiku, sold for N$160 000. The Namibian in March reported that a single mother of five was left destitute after her house was sold on auction after falling behind on her instalments to FNB. FNB Namibia, through its legal representative, Suzanne Prins, lodged a complaint with the media ombudsman, Clement Daniels, stating that the article is ‘inaccurate and so removed from the truth that it amounts to blatant fabrication’. Prins said the FNB has not left a single mother destitute and neither did it sell the Kuisebmond house illegally. Prins further said the article slighted the good name of the bank because it falsely stated that FNB had first agreed to accept the N$20 000 to cancel the auction, but later reneged on this agreement. In April, Prins wrote to the media ombudsman to state that the only option for the bank to redress the matter is a civil claim for defamation. After a follow-up interview with Haufiku, it did, in fact, emerge that Haufiku was not a client of FNB Namibia. Her husband, Kalute, was the bank customer since he took out the car loan with the bank. It also transpired that the Kuisebmond house was not bought with an FNB Namibia loan, and that there could thus not have been ‘monthly instalments’ to the bank pertaining to the house. Notwithstanding, Haufiku presented The Namibian with a copy of a deposit slip as proof that N$20 000 under the name of O. Imbili in reference to Kalute was paid into the FNB Namibia account of D.F. Malherbe & Partners on January 26, presumably in a rushed payment to stop the auction. Haufiku said the N$20 000 was later paid back to her benefactor. She also presented The Namibian with copies of deposit slips of variously N$500, N$1 000, and N$2 000 payments made by Kalute into the SP Prins Trust Account at FNB. These amounts, Haufiku said, were paid after the bank and Kalute agreed on repayments on the car loan. Kalute has in the meantime apparently sold the car. On May 28, Haufiku wrote a letter to Prins in which she stated that she had agreed last year to pay a certain amount on her husband’s car loan every month. In the letter she refers to an earlier request to Prins to point out the three months Kalute had not paid off on the car loan. She also refers to a document she had requested from Prins in which Kalute stated that he would no longer be able to pay off an agreed amount, and a letter signed by Kalute in which he purportedly agreed that the house be sold in lieu of the outstanding car payments. In her letter Haufiku says that since her husband had left seven years ago, she has single-handedly paid off the housing bills to NHE. According to an NHE statement provided by Haufiku, the last payment made to NHE was in January, but property and life insurance was still deducted until March 31. In the meantime Haufiku tried to use any available channel known to her to get the house back, but all her chances seem to have evaporated.She has, among other things, written a letter to the Legal Society, to a councillor in Walvis Bay. She was also referred to the Police to report the case, and to approach the Woman and Child Protection Unit to ask for assistance. Immediately after the house was auctioned, she said, she lived on the street where the house is before her next door neighbour took pity on her and allowed her to put up a shack in her yard. ‘This is not fair to burden someone like this,’ said another neighbour, Peter Elia,who had witnessed the eviction. ‘We tried to help and even spoke to the messenger of the court to give her some time. She was given two weeks.’ While everything was in disarray, Haufiku who is a fish packer at Hangana Fishing working night shift, lost some of her furniture stored outside the shack. She still lives in the shack next to the house she says she has been paying off for years, and has to bear witness to renovations and changes being made to the house.Adding insult to injury, Haufiku said, is that she has invested more than N$100 000 to add bedrooms with a built-in toilet, sitting room, and a tuck shop at the back of the yard where she sold kapana. She thus said she not only lost out on the additional investment made in the house, but also the additional income from her kapana enterprise. She estimated that due to the changes she has made to the house, the value of the house had gone up to N$430 000. Most heartbreaking, she said, is that only two of her five children could remain with her in the shack. The eldest was put in a boarding school, one stays with her sister, and another at a friend’s house. This adds to her expenses because she has to pay for the upkeep of the children who now live elsewhere. Haufiku against all odds, hopes this is just a nightmare from which she will wake up from.