Dear Editor

FIRST of all thank you for allowing me to air my views and concerns in your newspaper.  Secondly thank you for the information that you give us through your newspaper.  Keep on doing a good job.
I am a resident of Ruacana, and would like to air my concerns about matters that are hurting us.
Ruacana is a new village.  My concern is the evaluation of the houses of Oshifo. When the houses were evaluated the community was not informed or given a chance to comment on the evaluation price.  We were only told the results of the evaluation by the village councillors and the village secretary in a community meeting.  This meeting was conducted after everything was finished by the court.  The other thing is that the person who went to represent the community at the court was not even a community member of Oshifo or Ruacana as a whole.  So we feel that this was a planned issue to cut out the community in the whole process. This is corruption.  
The houses in Oshifo are very old and cannot be bought at N$10,000 a house or N$5,000 for a plot. Some plots are more than N$5,000. Some houses are about to fall.  How much is it going to cost one if you have to renovate this houses?  The other thing is the electricity in the houses is not fully installed.  There is only an electricity box in the kitchen and the occupants have to distribute it to the other rooms and put in electricity plugs at their own cost.  If your tap or toilet is not working well or totally not working then you have to repair it yourself.  Since these houses were built in 1975, they have never been renovated.  We, the community, were very unhappy about the whole process since there was no consultation done.  The community then elected a housing committee to deal with this problem.  A letter was written to the governor of Omusati, Hon Kayone Sacky.  A meeting was held with the PS, Hon Negonga, the Governor, The constituency councillor Hon Cornelius, the village secretary, the village councillors, the CDC members and the housing committee.

The PS said that the whole issue  was finished and done, and that anyone who feels that the house they are occupying is evaluated higher then its quality or value then has to take the number of the house and reappeal to the High court individually and cover their own costs.  He also
advised us to vacate the houses if we feel they are of poor quality.
The community felt threatened and unhappy and decided to have a peaceful demonstration on 21 April 2007, starting at 10H00 am.  One of the committee members went to Hon Councillor Cornelius Lazarus to inform him about the decision and that the petition would be handed over to him.  He responded that if this member took part in the demonstration it would affect her negatively as she could lose her job.  He said this was because she is a government employee.  That was a very big threat, because I have not heard about anyone who lost her/his job because of taking part in a peaceful demonstration.

The councillor does not want to receive the petition. He said he will be at a funeral on that same Saturday. Nor does he want to delegate someone. He advised us, the community, to look for someone else.  

We elected a councillor to stand for us and serve us, but he is never willing and able to listen to our problems.  


Fellow Namibians there are still places that are having corruption!  
It is time that the responsible people were followed up and dealt with.

Tashiti (secret name)