Suffering politicians!

I read an article in this weekends Windhoek Observer about the "Honorable" Minister for Lands and Resettlement, Regional Government and Housing; Jerry Ekandjo (photo above) and his latest expressions of genius. In the article, the good Minister explains the suffering of the top politicians in Namibia. He says: "The Ministers have GRN-vehicles (state-owned) to their disposal which they have to pay taxes for. They pay 1000 South-African Rand per month and if you multyply that with 5 years that is a lot of money!"

Yeah right, Mr Minister! If my head-counting is correct, the ministers pays a total of 50 000 Rand (Namibian Dollars) for the right to drive the vehicle(s) as much as they want wherever they want. That is more or less the amount they get in one month! And what about service of the car? New tyres? Fuel?? Who pays for that then? The tax-payers, one would assume...  

That would be tax-payers who in many cases lives in shacks like the one above, 18 years after the country got its independence. 

In many other countries, coming up with drivel like what he said, would bring a protest-storm worse than a tsunami and he would have to resign. But in Namibia, he will get promoted! 

Elections in november

At the end of November there will be elections here. I just wonder when will there be any excitement about it and any election-fever?? Seems like everyone who isn't a well-paid SWAPO-politician is rather un-interested in the whole thing. How many will even go and vote? Will SWAPO managed to fiddle with the results so they get all 72 seats in the Parliament? And when will the european "sister-organisations", such as Swedens Social-Democrates stop supporting SWAPO in everything they say and do? One could almost think that they are just as corrupt!

New Blog

I see that the SWAPO party is finally getting their act together and got their website up. www.swapoparty.org Ofcourse it seems to be only for the party-faithful and it is filled with the usual praise-givings from the “saved ones”… I doubt there will be any opposite views allowed there  

It’s damn cold here now at 4.30 am, just about +- 0 C. We sure need more of that famous “global warming” to warm up our cold bodies!!

Am out of imagination now, so will post more tomorrow… I will read the Windhoek Observer later today and see if I can find any interesting stuff to write about. But, that paper really have gone south after ol’ Smittie died. Now it’s just an ordinary paper without any hard political edge or any bitching of any sort. They are just writing news-articles that is trying to please the mighty ones… Damn sad!

I read in yesterdays New Era http://www.newera.com.na/article.php?articleid=5866 paper that some of our good Swapo parliamentarians don’t like that NGO’s and I guess certain churches (guess which!) wants to be involved in educating people how to go about when they vote in the elections that will be held later this year. No-one seems to know exactly when they will be held, for some reason that seems to be a state-secret!! Anyway, the Swapo-folks says there is no need for anyone else than the election-commission to be involved. Of course some people would say that the commission is filled with people from ONE party and that might not be so good… So anyway, if they don’t want anyone else apart from Swapo-folks to be involved, they have(as I see it) two choices: Either they order the commission-people to be fair towards all parties (yeah, right) or they just scrap the elections since they don’t seem to want the common people to be involved in politics anyway. Why even allow them to vote?? There is, after all, a risk that people would vote “wrong” and heaven forbid that! Better then to call off all elections so they can protect people from them-selves! Heck, if it is done in such good and strong democratic bastions like China, Cuba and North-Korea (incidentially also seen in this country as Namibias biggest and best friends) then why not here as well!!? 

This week have seen the taxi-drivers in Windhoek in big protests over a new regulation that says that their taxi-signs must be drilled on-to the roof. That of course made them go nuts!! But I can understand them; if these clowns wants to drive around as getaway-cars for robbers and murderers and be able to take off their taxi-signs as they please, then to have the sign fixed permanently to the car creates big problems! But don’t worry, Nabta (the taxi-organisation) is on it and will surely make a deal with the powerful so it all can be avoided. Here in Namibia, of course, the taxi-owners/drivers interests comes first and the publics (that is forced to use taxis) needs and safety comes on a very low 10th place or so…