PHOTO: City of Windhoek
The suspension of the City of Windhoek acting boss Rekliff Kandjiriomuini has been welcomed by some but has also cast speculation on whether investigations will be expedited into the municipal 5G project.
Kandjiriomuini was suspended in connection with allegations that he, with Nicanor Ndjoze, offered a N$5million bribe to Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) councillor Brunhilde Cornelius.
Director at the Citizens for An Accountable and Transparent Society (CATS) Carola Engelbrecht said, “I am very proud of our councillor Brunhilde Cornelius who had the gut to do all these cut-throat things with concealed recorders and stuff with the police and so on so that this could come out. It is a good thing that it is not swept under the carpet again as usual.”
“The issue is just how long this whole process continues until the perpetrators are brought to book. That is always the problem in our country that it takes forever and it just fizzles out and the people get away with whatever they did. Mr Rekliff is known to have a history that is not quite clean but it is very good that there was at least one councillor at our municipal that had the guts to bring this to light.”
She said the scandal has nothing to do with political parties, “because we have a lot of opportunists in political parties and they see this is a way to make an income”.
“The higher the position the greater is the temptation to pocket more than what you are entitled to. The people that are working at the municipality get salaries and benefits that boggle the mind and constantly our city budget is depleted and they don’t have money for this and that but they never cut their salaries. These people can not earn that much. They get salaries and benefits that are even more than that of our president.”
Lawyer Eben De Klerk also said that the manner in which the City of Windhoek got involved in the telecom space and the involvement of Huawei shows there are some shoddy deals behind the scenes.
“I think the issue here is that there are quite a few indications that there are corrupt deals being made behind the scenes. There was a delegation that went to China and it was reported to the council of the City of Windhoek and it was after that trip that the council was requested to approve a memorandum of understanding with Huawei.
Several questions were put to the City of Windhoek which I believe those questions were all outstanding with regards to the procurement procedures that were followed and many more. So, there is a lot of doubt on the honesty of the whole project itself,” he said.