TransNamib ACC referral: four years without a public account

Statement by the Shadow Minister of International Relations and Trade

The issued PDF carries a mismatched headline on the cover. The paragraphs below follow the issued TransNamib–ACC body of the statement.

1. Four years ago, government’s own investigators looked into the state-owned enterprise, TransNamib, and used a phrase that should have set off alarms across the whole of government: prima facie evidence of potential fraud and theft.

2. An independent Ernst & Young investigation, dated March 2022, found that the revenue owed to a public company had been misrepresented, month after month, at the expense of the state, and recommended in plain terms that the matter go to the Namibian Police and the Namibia Revenue Agency.

3. On 29 March 2022, the then Minister of Public Enterprises referred that report to the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and then, four years later, no prosecution, no recovery of a single dollar, no public accounting of any kind.

4. A documented finding of potential fraud in a public enterprise was handed to the very institution created to fight corruption and it vanished into silence.

5. The Independent Patriots for Change asks the question every Namibian is entitled to ask: who is being protected, and by whom? This is not a technical matter.

6. When a government sits on a finding like this for four years, it is making a choice and every month of that silence is a decision someone took. The Namibian people are owed the names of the officials responsible for acting on this referral and an explanation of why they did not.

7. The cruelty is sharpest for TransNamib’s own workers. During the very period the report examined, the company had fallen more than N$23 million behind on its employees’ pension, medical, and social security contributions.

8. The drivers, technicians, and clerks who kept this country’s railway moving went unprotected, while the losses the report identified went unrecovered. That is who pays for four years of official silence: the workers.

9. Namibians have seen this before. At NAMCOR, findings were referred to the authorities, and the country still waits, years later, for accountability that never arrives.

10. The pattern is always the same: the state investigates itself, finds exactly what was feared, hands over the file and then the machinery of accountability simply stops. A country cannot fight corruption with investigations it commissions and then buries.

11. The Anti-Corruption Commission is about to have a new Director-General. This is the test. This referral sat on that Commission’s desk through the entire term of the outgoing Director-General, with no action taken.

12. We therefore ask: will the incoming Director-General take up this serious referral and act on it, or will he inherit it and ignore it, exactly as it was ignored for the last four years?

13. IPC calls on the Minister of Finance and Public Enterprises to answer, to the Namibian people: why a documented finding of potential fraud and theft, referred to the ACC in March 2022, has produced no prosecution, no recovery, and no public account in over four years; which officials were responsible for acting on that referral, and on whose authority it was allowed to lie without action; whether TransNamib’s employees have been made whole on the contributions the report records as unpaid; and whether this referral will be placed before the incoming ACC Director-General as a named priority matter, not left to inherit four years of inaction.

14. The fight against corruption is not won by the reports we commission. It is won by the ones we act on. Namibians are still waiting for this government to act on its own.

Namibia is all we have
Namibia is not for sale
We must and can save it!

Back to rodneycloete.com.na · Earlier on this site: Vitol–Nasan competition conditions suspended (7 July 2026)