Blog

ANTI-Corruption Commission (ACC) boss Paulus Noa said Namibia hasn’t lost the battle against corruption.

He was responding to the 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), produced by Transparency International, which ranked Namibia 59 out of 180 nations.

Namibia received 49 out of 100 points on the index, indicating no improvement in the fight of corruption since 2021.

Noa said the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was developing their own measurements to fight corruption at a continental level, as well as within the African Union.

He said transparency has no uniform indicators.

“If they are assessing me and you, they will not use the same indicators on that particular year. They look at many indicators such as political conflicts and economic issues.

“Just look at countries which have conflicts, these are political conflicts and not necessarily corruption,” he said.

What these organisations do is look at the country’s economy, by getting data from different organisations including the World Bank, African Development Bank and International Monetary Fund, he said.

“You might find an African country ranked as the best in fighting corruption but it does not even have an institution that investigates cases of corruption,” he said.

Noa maintained that the country is doing well terms of fighting corruption.

“If you look at Namibia in 2022, we were still among the top six in the region and among the top 10 on the continent, ranked 59 in the world out of those 180 countries.”

This indicates that Namibia has not lost the battle against corruption, he said.

Denmark was ranked as the first country on the index, at 90 out of 100 points, while Somalia is perceived as most corrupt, at 12 points out of 100.

Regionally, South Africa is ranked at 72, Botswana 35, Lesotho 99, Zambia 116 and Zimbabwe 142 out of 180 countries.

“I have been at the ACC for all these years, but I have never seen a representative from the organisation who came to assess corruption,” Noa said.

These organisations have their own sources and don’t come and do research or surveys to satisfy themselves with information on the ground, he said.

He said civil society organisations could not be expected to be objective.

“It is not always that when the country’s economy is down it’s due to corruption, it could be because of a global decline.

“This ranking is worrisome. The question I have for these organisations is, what is it that we are not doing in Namibia that we need to do to increase our momentum in the fight against corruption?”

Many of the claims in the report are economic and political issues, not factual issues pertaining to prosecution of corruption cases, Noa said.

“Look at South Africa, there are measures in place to fight corruption but instead of them going up, they are going down.

“Namibia’s ranking did not change, both in 2021 and 2022. Are they saying Namibia made no efforts in fighting corruption?”

Institute For Public Policy Research executive director Graham Hopwood said Namibia’s performance indicates the country is not headed in the right direction.

“It’s not possible to know exactly what factors influence our ranking, but it is clear that the country has a major corruption problem, which we are not dealing with,” Hopwood said.

Unresolved cases, like the collapse of the SME Bank are undermining the country’s reputation, he said.

“We can take some credit from the fact that we are among the better performing African nations, but we should be doing better. Recent reports such as the controversial health tender and the auditor general’s report on Covid-related spending tend to suggest that things will not improve soon.”