Climate change is expected to dramatically alter the lifestyles of poor people in Namibia, say the authors of a study. Their findings were published by the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) this month (December).

It was not with routine interest that I opened a copy of the book volume on “Transitions in Namibia”. This year has towards its end brought visible efforts to redirect the way Namibia is going politically, and thus redirect the lives of Namibians. The recent congress of the ruling SWAPO Party made important decisions, that were already in advance challenged by a new party formed by people with a background of the very core of SWAPO for the last three decades. We do not know what happens with the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP). Will it experience the same as the Congress of Democrats, founded less than ten years ago, or will it be able to create enough support to really influence the way Namibia is developing? I would simplify the choices as either following the Zimbabwe way to disaster, or to find another, essentially more democratic and economically just and viable way of development.

Every analysis is based on history. I have found by experience that the government of Namibia is not really interested in history at all. They want something, which Chris Saunders calls “patriotic history”. The idea is to produce “the one and only” history. The right one, giving the only truth of what has taken place. It is almost written already. Sam Nujoma has published a book called “Where Others Wavered”, which aims to enshrine armed struggle as the decisive factor in bringing freedom and independence. As Saunders points out, the aim is to cement the arm of exile leaders in the present and coming power struggles in the power struggle establishing “liberation credentials” and labelling deviating opinions as unpatriotic and imperialist.

In writing about the centrally important issue of land, Phanuel Kaapama discusses also the surprising way SWAPO turned its coat from a quite rigid soviet version of socialism to all out capitalism just before the 435-process commenced at the end of the 1980’s. I do not question the wisdom of Hidipo Hamutenya, when he said in 1990: “democratisation of Namibian society was necessary before the process of socialist transformation could commence”. But contrary to what happened in South Africa, there was almost no public discussion whatsoever on this tremendous change of basic political line. Even the labour leaders adopted with little resistance a so-called “social partnership”.

Namibian leaders have repeatedly expressed their admiration of the Zimbabwean land distribution policies. I do not believe, however, that Namibia will in this question follow the disastrous footsteps. The government knows well the experience of the couple of hundred farms which have been bought by state or individuals through Affirmative Action Loan Scheme. The experience shows how all important is the professional competence of the new farmers. Instead of becoming prosperous, new farmers have impoverished and become dependent of continuous government support for survival. Some have found paid work in neighbouring farms. Some owners have rented the farm back to the previous owner. Without training and slowly accumulating expertise farms do not produce the expected returns. In this issue, Mr Kaapama is somewhat too optimistic, I suspect, in indicating that the experience gained in the communal areas is broadly sufficient for the task.

As a trade unionist, I was particularly interested to read Herbert Jauch’s account on labour policies. The Labour Research and Resource Institute, LaRRI, which would not exist without Jauch’s initiative and commitment, has produced invaluable analysis and data for trade unions and the general public. I remember in 1987 having to defend in a United Nations workshop in Lusaka the idea of a highest pay differential of 1:10 in the independent Namibia. It is about the actual situation in the Nordic countries. SWAPO leaders present said that they cannot accept such a large differential. Today the difference between the national minimum wage of a Ramatex worker’s salary, relates to the pay of managers in the civil service to something like 1 to 50, and more than 1 to 100 for managers of parastatals.
The Namibian elite wants to earn as much as their peers in USA and Europe, although the carrying capacity of the economy and productivity of work does not warrant it. It does not leave much money for anything else, especially when the civil service is relatively large. In his chapter on the new black Namibian elite, Henning Melber shows this in figures: the top 20% earn almost 80% of all income: “Independence did not produce a national bourgeoisie, but a crypto-capitalist self-enriching elite, which expends its energy on exploiting the public purse, a truly parasitic class.“

A long time issue in the labour movement in Namibia is the affiliation of the largest trade union federation NUNW to the ruling party. Just as has been argued, it has led to stagnation of efforts to defend the rights of workers. It has also led to spreading the internal struggles of SWAPO inside the NUNW. It has gone very far and contributed to an erosion of understanding of where the labour leaders belong. It is quite astonishing to read that trade union leaders have accepted board and management positions in private and parastatal enterprises. This way they adopt neo-liberal policies and with that, the NUNW loses its mass base, as Jauch states.

Logically enough, workers have had to take their mass power into their own hands and away from their compromised leaders. Volker Winterfeldt gives a very good account of what happened in the biggest single employer in Namibia, the Ramatex textile factory. Fed up with the stagnant wages, four years of inaction by their trade union and constant exposure to bullying by the management and the government, workers voted for strike. Surprisingly easily, after three days, they won a raise almost doubling their income and benefits. In a neo-liberal economy Ramatex has been able to exploit the opportunities offered by the Namibian state and its Asian and Namibian employees to an extent Karl Marx could vividly describe in his book The Capital. - And in addition to pollute the ground water.

On my latest visit to Namibia a year ago I was really astonished of the impressive Chinese presence in the country. In a very few years Chinatowns have emerged, bringing construction, shopping areas, investment for energy production. Obviously this has happened with the full consent of the government, tenders have been won, work permits and retail shop licences have been granted. Gregor Dobler has taken the trouble of finding out how the process works, including bribing the decision makers. The cost of a work permit is between 20,000 to 100,000 Namibian Dollars.

Dobler’s work is admirable. It came into my mind that the political system in China could be the ideal in the eyes of the present government of Namibia: One party in absolute power, enjoying the fruits of a free-wheeling capitalism, no real trade unions or effective opposition. - Preferably, no critical media either.

Lalli Metsola describes and analyses the situation of ex-combatants. It certainly deserves research. It is a rather safe prediction to say that the newest definition by the ministry of a war veteran will cause endless controversy and court processes. Even I myself qualify as a war veteran, according to the definition. Lalli Metsola describes the fate of the former SWATF/Koevoet members as being still pariahs. They are out from war-veteran definition because they were not members of liberation forces. On the other hand, it will be problematic to draw lines between those who have been in exile, but participated in different activities. Lots to do for lawyers, I bet.

Mattia Fumati is afraid of the vision of youth in uniform coming from Zimbabwe style training camps, marching before the President chanting SWAPO songs. We have seen it in Europe before. On the lighter side, he describes accurately the activities of the Shinyewile club in Rundu. The aspiring young elite organises activities that depict their capabilities as future leaders, taking care not to offend the present ones, although mocking them softly. And the club is the best way to have a good time together.

Wolfgand Zeller and Bennet Kangumu Kangumu have dug deep into the strange geography of the Caprivi strip, with which its problems are intimately bound. The separateness and particular identities have not given the Caprivi region and its people much chance to live common history with the rest of Namibia. The old modus vivendi between the Mafwe and Subia and their associates was shattered by the new power relations in independent Namibia. But now, with the construction of the Trans-Caprivi Corridor with bridges over Zambezi a real common blood vein has been established and with it, new economic and political structures may emerge.

Graham Hopwood explores the problems encountered in the effort to create a regional level of administration between central government and local authorities. Regional structures carry a bias from the Bantustan era. The central authorities are also otherwise reluctant to give away power from their own hands. On the other hand, administrative capacity to handle coordinating functions and especially accounting seems to be lacking. As a consequence progress to really delegate tasks to regional level has been slow, in spite of public pronouncements of intentions.
The book has a very strong gender equality tendency. It ends with three weighty analyses of where Namibia stands now in this important respect. Dianne Hubbard goes through the most important gender-related legislation and shows in detail, how traditions and opinions have found expression in the laws. She shows the difficulty in applying Western juridical concepts in another cultural environment. As an example we can mention parental leave, which is not really at home in Namibians social structures.

Lucy Edwards looks into the HIV/AIDS disaster from the female perspective and argues powerfully how it is linked to inequalities and gender relations. It was a surprise for me to read that only 13.4 % of Namibians are formally married and together with cohabiting 15.5% this kind of couples make up only 29%. The figures ridicule an effort to control HIV/AIDS through restricting sex life inside marriage.
Suzanne LaFont describes the real, rather promiscuous, sexual behaviour in Namibia. It is actually the tradition.
The legislation believes, however, that female sexuality needs to be contained and, if possible, controlled. Among lawmakers reverence of tradition and nostalgia compete with politically correct gender equality. Political corrected does not weigh much in the speeches of Sam Nujoma, who threatened homophiles with arrest, deportation and imprisonment, all illegal threats. Suzanne LaFont notes, however, that the HIV-pandemic has forced a discussion on sexuality, which would otherwise not be happening.

Now, as much as ever, we need to understand what is going on in Namibia. This book is therefore timely, clearly written for giving us tools for analysis today. I commend its editor for recruiting top-level researchers contributing to this book, and for his further commitment to the ongoing task.
Henning Melber (ed.), Transitions in Namibia. Which changes for whom? Uppsala. The Nordic Africa Institute 2007.

* Pekka Peltola lives in Helsinki/Finland. He is a long-standing trade union activist, who worked years in support of SWAPO in exile in Cuanza Sul and elsewhere. He published a PhD thesis on the Namibian trade union movement (“The Lost May Day”) in 1995 and together with Iina Soiri (in 1999) the book : “Finland and the Liberation of Southern Africa”.

Namibia's land reform programme is a "zero sum game" that merely swaps one form of poverty for another in its current resettlement programme, according to an independent report on attempts to find a equitable solution to racially skewed land ownership.

At the beginning of October, the European Commission will hold a prize-giving ceremony at Europe House for the International Drawing Competition on Gender Equality, which was launched in March by European Commissioner Benita-Ferrero Waldner on the occasion of International Women’s Day. This was announced in a press statement by the European Commission’s Aude Guignard. According to Guignard, ten drawings from children aged between 8 and 10 were pre-selected and sent to Brussels.

The internationally renowned African scholar Mahmood Mamdani is said to hold the view that the only feature of post-colonialism he is aware of is the post office. He tries to suggest that true Independence as liberation from the structures, contents and ideologies of the colonial era remains a remote goal.

Decolonisation was more so a hand-over of formal political power, while social structures and hierarchies - as well as mindsets - remained largely intact.

Little has changed in terms of a shift in power relations or alternative concepts of power. This includes the political sphere with regard to the character of political dominance. Looking back at the 17 years since Namibia's formal Independence one is tempted to agree with Mamdani's sobering conclusion.
As if to make a point, the current political culture is a far cry from the liberating gospel originally preached. Not that there was - realistically and in retrospective - much to be expected (although we did). After all, more than a century of colonial occupation took its toll. Apartheid was anything but a fertile ground to socialize democrats and to allow for the internalization of fundamental respect for human rights and differing opinions. Nor was the authoritarian organization of the exile situation under the liberation movement Swapo an alternative to repressive control.

The movement's recognition as the sole and authentic representative of the Namibian people by the General Assembly of the United Nations in the mid-1970s was a celebrated diplomatic victory in our ranks and within the supporting solidarity movement. What we then did not realize: it was also a very undemocratic notion, based on exclusion. It handed over the sole power of definition of legitimate Namibian identity to the leadership of one (admittedly by far most relevant) among several organizations. Those not members or followers of Swapo were not entitled to any representation to shape the guiding principles leading into Namibian nationhood.

Despite a constitutional framework, which laid the foundation for a pluralist, human rights oriented and democratic society (as a result also of the international - meaning Western - desire to control and limit social change), Namibia since then became neither more tolerant nor more democratic. Nor did the majority of the formerly colonized population reap any meaningful material benefits from the shift in political power (forget about the fat cats). Poverty remained chronic, so did other forms of destitution. Violence against women and children has abhorrent dimensions, and the self-enrichment by members of the new elite seems to have no limit. Educational services and health provisions deteriorate, and Namibia's rank in international standardized surveys (as problematic and dubious as some of these might be) did not improve. Instead, we are campaigning for a status as an “as if Least Developed Country (LDC)”. What a shame.

Namibia started under a United Nations supervised transition to a sovereign state as the darling of the international community. In the meantime it has become - in the words of Joe Diescho - just another African country; which, of course, it is. The way Diescho uses the image, plays with the existing Eurocentric stereotypes, that this is nothing to be proud of. But did we not have the opportunity to build a society offering reasons for pride, self-respect and confidence as an African country, which used its opportunity to present evidence that this is nothing to be ashamed of or associated with negative stereotypes?

The honeymoon is long over. Hardly noticed, all Nordic states - once the pioneers among the Western countries, which supported Swapo and the Namibian people for the right to self-determination - have reduced diplomatic representation below the rank of ambassadors or even closed their embassies. Their bilateral development cooperation is shrinking continuously. Norway has withdrawn years ago, and Sweden will be closing its offices next year. Finland's ambassador - who dared to publicly share criticism over the government's dubious priorities to engage in a war in the Congo instead of reducing poverty at home - was requested a decade into Independence not to return from his annual leave at home. He was never replaced on an ambassadorial level, nor was the Swedish ambassador whose term ended shortly afterwards. The government seemed not to be bothered by such visible loss of legitimacy among these good friends. Instead, other alliances were consolidated with countries such as Zimbabwe, China, North Korea, Russia and other states hardly known as welfare societies or for their democratic achievements.

Looking at the hype of the last few weeks and months, one has no reasons for optimism. John Makumbe, who was denied to deliver his lecture on Zimbabwe as originally announced on the campus of UNAM, sees the writing on the wall. Let's hope he is wrong. Students only a few weeks earlier felt a need to demonstrate in support of the University's chancellor and Founding Father of the Republic in a political and legal dispute not related to the university at all. Sadly enough, they did not come out as forcefully to defend academic freedom, which was so blatantly violated by the same person, when intervening to prevent the internationally well known Zimbabwean academic from presenting his lecture, thereby making a mockery of the country's highest research and teaching institution's autonomy.

Interesting too is that almost everyone - despite controversial views - seems to accept that the NSHR submission to the ICC touches upon the (undefined) notion of national reconciliation. It does not. It seeks to hold high-ranking office bearers in the former liberation movement accountable for human rights violations within its own ranks. This addresses issues of internal oppression against own members, including rape, torture, execution and murder by neglect. That some among the many victims were suspected to be spies is not the point.

The point is, that many were not, and that the treatment as such violated any minimum standards of a human rights based culture, as the kind of injustice practiced under the Apartheid regime against which we were actually fighting.

Those few hundred who survived the ordeal (while most others did not) have ever since their return in mid-1989 asked for an admission that Swapo did wrong and should deal with the issue instead of sweeping it under the carpet. Seeking to enforce such demands after painful 18 years of denial by trying to use international legal options at hand (even though the effort is doomed to fail for formal reasons) is declared an act of national betrayal and heresy. This merely confirms the misperception among the political rulers that their party organization is in their eyes identical with the nation and the state. They are untouchable and above the law. - Instead of hiding behind such a misleading smokescreen, they should regain legitimacy and moral commanding heights by dealing with the failures if not within the national judicial system then by an honest and fact seeking investigation initiated by themselves. Otherwise the rule of law will soon end as law of the rulers.

Instead, once again, it's the old game of blaming and accusing the messenger for disclosing the worrying moral decay when it comes to the state of the nation. The so-called misguided elements allegedly seeking to orchestrate a vendetta for merely personal frustrations (which these victims undoubtedly and understandably also have) are singled out and blamed. So are those media, which dare to make it a public affair and provide a platform for the dissenting voices in civil society. Far from dealing with the matter, it is dealt with those who dare to join the demands for transparency and accountability through efforts to limit their rights to do so. It is about getting rid of inconvenient truths and their advocates, not about addressing the root causes of the affairs.

Just as with John Makumbe and the likes: prevent them from speaking out, as if this would allow ignoring what is going on. At the end, we might indeed end in a similar state of affairs as his home country, in which so many dedicated citizens were forced into exile once again. This time by those who claimed to have liberated the people. So far, differences do however still remain: Namibia's head of state generously offers one-way tickets to unwanted dissenting voices. They are neither arrested nor killed. Not yet. But his softer approach is already another form of liquidation.

Namibia lacks civility defined as an agreement to disagree agreeably. But Independence is something to fight for, daily and always. Solidarity should be with them, who dare to do so and challenge the sell-outs to individual privilege, who are occupying state power and shy away from taking responsibility in the public interest. Their duty would instead require acting not only in their own interest, but in the interest of all they claim to have liberated. Like in so many other societies, however, those will ultimately have to accept and execute such responsibility themselves, guided by their own convictions and values, against all odds. The fight for ownership over the definition of what is supposed to be acceptable and what not is far from over. It has just started.

* Henning Melber joined Swapo as a son of German immigrants in 1974. He was director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) between 1992 and 2000 and is currently the executive director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala/Sweden.

* Please send comments to or comment online at

Namibia is to set up two special offices to implement obligations related to climate change control under the Kyoto Protocol. Namibia acceded to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change in July 2003. To implement the Protocol, Namibia needs to establish a Designated National Authority (DNA) and a Clean Development Mechanism Office (CDM). At its latest meeting, Cabinet decided to create these two offices.

Sadly, many people in southern Africa are dependent on the benevolence of landowners or the protection of the government for their housing needs, thanks to the vestiges of colonialism, which placed land resources in few hands. Recognising these inequities requires that African courts apply the law in such a way that addresses housing needs while enforcing traditional property law.

The national anti-corruption agency of Namibia has decided not to investigate further the controversial awarding of bidding to top officials in the Office of former Namibian President Sam Nujoma. Human rights activists call the decision a "severe blow to Namibia's anti-corruption crusade."

Straight talk with straight friends’ is The Rainbow Project’s (trp) LGBTI Week’s theme this year with the event taking place between 27 and 30 June. The Namibian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) organisation – trp – endevours to raise awareness and educate the public about diversity.

POVERTY remains a scourge that the world is grappling with, and the case is no different in Namibia, where stakeholders are meeting for a three-day conference to discuss how the country can find effective means to reduce poverty. The first national conference on poverty reduction, unemployment and entrepreneurship, which began in Windhoek yesterday, is being held under the theme 'Entrepreneurship as an alternative source to employment creation and poverty alleviation'.

Black economic empowerment (BEE) continues to cultivate human and natural exploitation for the benefits of few at the expenses of far too many. It turns de-colonisation into a private business for self-enrichment. Henning Melber on the ensuing kleptocracy in Namibia and the possibility of another Zimbabwean style tragedy.

A Namibian parliamentary committee hearing was told in April 2007 by the executive secretary of the state-owned Namibia Development Corporation (NDC) in liquidation (during apartheid days the 'Bantu Investment Corporation'), that the tens of millions of Namibian dollars dished out earlier as credits to black empowerment initiatives will in most cases not be repaid – even though many of the lenders are among the nouveau riche.

Limits to liberation
Ever since independence in 1990, Namibia’s government has blamed the country’s exploitation under settler colonialism for the unabated social disparities. Indeed, the transfer of political power left, as part of a negotiated settlement, the existing socio-economic structures largely untouched. The inequalities were endorsed as status quo in terms of constitutionally protected ownership and property rights. Limited social changes had to be induced inside this legally binding framework guided by a policy of 'national reconciliation' and 'affirmative action'. As a result, the privileged segment of society became racially less exclusive.

But according to the empirical evidence presented by the annual Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Namibia remains among the most unequal societies in the world – despite an average per capita income ranking it as lower middle-income country. A World Bank commissioned report alerted in 2005 that these inequalities 'represent a threat to national cohesion, peace, and political stability'. A UN country assessment warned of an unfolding humanitarian crisis due to the combination of HIV/Aids, food insecurity and the ineffective delivery of critical social services to the most vulnerable groups.

Despite such concerns, the government has refused to introduce a Basic Income Grant (BIG) - demanded for years by a broad church-based alliance - as not feasible in terms of its fiscal constraints. But more than a billion Namibian dollars was spent on a luxurious new high security state house complex. Nonetheless in April 2007 it was justified as a 'pro-poor' measure during the budgetary debate in parliament. A SWAPO MP demanded in all seriousness that posh cars should be exempted from the speed limit on Namibia’s roads.

Power, privilege and poverty
Black economic empowerment (BEE) has so far served the interests of a new political-bureaucratic elite from the ranks of the erstwhile liberation movement. Those who liberated mainly themselves profitably cashed their access to the country’s resources through their political and public service offices.

Corruption and misappropriation of funds nourished a parasitic minority. This had been spectacularly confirmed by several high calibre cases of fraud and self-enrichment schemes looting pension funds and other public finances. Shady business practices illustrated in a textbook way the infamous 'fat-cat syndrome' prevailing. Prime Minister Nahas Angula called the abuse of several hundred million Namibian dollars from the state administered pension funds on get-rich-quick schemes masquerading as BEE 'just asset-stripping'.

In a revelation of self-enrichment schemes, described by the locally published Insight magazine in March 2006 as 'the mother of all empowerment deals'. Since mid-2006 another 'horde of black economic empowerment groups' have come under increased scrutiny. The deal set up between the South African oil giant Sasol and a conglomerate of locally created pseudo-firms without any proper offices, named a former trade union leader and several high-ranking government officials operating within an intricate web of pseudo-enterprises, as its main Namibian beneficiaries. As the former trade unionist declared in defence of the deal, the shareholders were 'just black entrepreneurs who needed the money and took advantage of a given situation'.

A popular school of thought within critical poverty research holds the view that it is the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of narrow privileged groups that creates and perpetuates inequalities. According to such an understanding, the analysis of power is fundamental to any examination of poverty. Privatisation of public resources results in political-administrative power as personalised power; in politics as a kind of business enterprise; and in vertical clientele relationships of a neo-patrimonial nature. The result is an increasingly authoritarian and incompetent state that rarely responds to public pressure.

The (class) struggle continues
Since independence, Namibia has produced a crypto-capitalist, petty-minded self-enriching new black elite, which spends its energy exploiting the public purse. There is an absence of a meaningful, profit-generating industrial sector, where capital would be additionally accumulated through surplus production based on the exploitation of value adding labour - which implies at least employment for a majority of people. The creation of individual wealth relies on the privatisation of natural resources (mainly in the sectors of fishing, mining, agriculture and tourism) or benefits linked to privileges in the public sector and state owned enterprises. Public procurement and other outsourcing activities by those occupying the commanding heights of the state agencies turn 'affirmative action' and BEE into self-rewarding schemes among loyal members of the erstwhile liberation movement.

Such co-optation into the ruling segments within an already existing socio-economic system is far from social transformation. BEE continues to cultivate human and natural exploitation for the benefits of few at the expenses of far too many. It turns de-colonisation largely into a private business for self-enrichment. A result of such kleptocracy is the gradual loss of legitimacy. Zimbabwe-type decay is the writing at the wall. De-colonisation of such kind is not about redistribution of (relative) wealth for the ordinary people. It is self-enrichment for a new elite and business as usual.

* Dr Henning Melber is executive director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden where he was research director at The Nordic Africa Institute, 2000-2006. A son of German immigrants, he joined SWAPO in 1974. Hw was director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek, Namibia between 1992 and 2000.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Amidst calls from all corners of the political divide to return to the drawing board on the land reform issue, the Namibia Farm Workers Union recently concluded its land conference, entitled ‘Give the Land Back to the People’. This was possibly the first broad-based platform that has dealt exclusively with the land issue since the seminal National Land Conference in 1991 that resulted in the development of policies and legislation to direct the land reform programme adopted by the Government of Namibia.

History was made in the energy sector when a licence was granted to investors for the erection of a large wind-power project that could eventually generate 25 per cent of Namibia's electricity supply. This makes Namibia the first African country to embark on large-scale wind-power generation.

There are children in Namibia who are out of school for one reason or another, even though education is a human right. This is the view of the Deputy Minister of Education, Dr Becky Ndjoze-Ojo, who was the keynote speaker at the opening on Monday of the Education for All Global Week at the UN Plaza. Hundreds of learners from schools in the capital Windhoek attended the event, which is celebrated in more than 100 countries worldwide.

On 25 April 2007, "The Namibian" newspaper reported that its editor, Gwen Lister, and The Free Press of Namibia, the company that owns and publishes "The Namibian", were instructed to pay N$7 million (approximately US$1 million) to the Palazzolo family, or face legal action in the form of five defamation suits. The family is threatening to sue "The Namibian" especially in connection with a front-page story published under the headline "Mafia linked to Namibian gems" on 23 March.

There is growing frustration among people who applied for Government resettlement farms in Namibia about the lack of transparency and generally vague criteria used in the selection of candidates for resettlement. Explanations given by Government and Regional Settlement officials often result in more questions than answers, complicating efforts to seek clarity on the issue.

Despite a multi-faceted awareness campaign involving the media focusing on AIDS, the campaign appears to have fallen on deaf ears as HIV prevalence ratio among pregnant women in Namibia has increased slightly, a new report has revealed. The 2006 National Sentinel Survey among pregnant women reveals that the overal HIV prevalence from the 2006 survey was 19.9 percent representing an increase of 0.02 percent compared to 2004, which recorded a prevalence rate of 19.7 percent.

A one-day business seminar of the second Namibia-China Joint Commission on Economic Corporation has culminated in the signing of 13 business memoranda of understanding between Namibian and Chinese businesses. The seminar was held in Windhoek on Monday. The two countries signed business agreements on marble blocks, seal oil, wet-blue cattle hides, manganese ore, marble slabs, fishmeal, tuna as well as blister copper.

Human rights and anti-corruption bodies agree that Namibia needs expanded laws to protect whistle-blowers more in the fight against corruption, Catherine Sasman reports for the New Era.

Water levels are still keeping thousands in camps after flooding in Namibia's northern Caprivi region in early March, and aid agencies warn it could take months before displaced residents can return home. Torrential rain in neighbouring Angola caused the Zambezi River to burst its banks and spill onto the floodplains.