Floodwater caused by heavy rains in Namibia's northern and northeastern regions has brought an outbreak of cholera, and is also being blamed for a lower than expected cereal harvest for 2008.

The Namibian government declared a state of emergency on 5 March, while the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in its situation report on 13 March that conditions in the affected regions were "worsening": 72 cases of suspected cholera have been reported, of which 4 were confirmed and one was fatal.

Cholera is a gastrointestinal disease typically spread by drinking contaminated water and can cause severe diarrhoea, leading to fatal dehydration in extreme cases. It can be prevented by treating drinking water with chlorine added, and by improving hygiene conditions.

"The increased floodwaters have submerged pit latrines and overflowed the sewerage system. We are anticipating an increase in cholera cases and other waterborne diseases," UNICEF said.

A report by the Namibia Early Warning and Food Information System (NEWFIS), released on 10 March, noted that "heavy and constant rains received between mid-January and early February 2008, especially in the North Central and Caprivi regions, have resulted in waterlogging and leaching, and leads to poor germinations and stunted growth [of crops]."

The NEWFIS crop assessment mission was conducted between 4 February and 20 February in the country's main agricultural regions in the north, and included Caprivi, Kavango, Omusati, Ohangwena, Oshana and Oshikoto, with forecasts made on the assumption that normal weather conditions would prevail for the remainder of the season.

On that basis, NEWFIS forecast Namibia's aggregate cereal production at 138,600 tonnes, "a slight improvement of about 10 percent on a relatively poor 2006/07 harvest".

"However, if flood and unfavourable rains continue for the remainder of the season, harvest prospects are likely to be significantly reduced," the NEWFIS Crop Prospects and Food Security Situation report cautioned.

The 2007/08 agricultural season was delayed in most crop-producing regions, due to "inadequate and sporadic rainfall, coupled with prolonged dry spells in the north central regions during October to December 2007."

Army worms

The constant heavy rain during and up to the NEWFIS assessment had also caused an outbreak of army worms in the Oshana and Oshikoto regions, posing "a major threat to crops and pasture that are recovering from a recent drought," the crop prospect report said.

Army worms, scientifically known as spodoptera exempata, devour all green plants in their path and breed prolifically, making them difficult to control.

NEWFIS said household food security in the Kavango region, on the border with Angola, "has deteriorated significantly", while in Caprivi most households were reported to have "depleted their food stock since January 2008 and are now market dependents, as it is the case with Kavango region."

The harvest prospects in Caprivi, known as the region's "green basket", were seen as poor "due to flooding". Namibia's weather service has forecast more rain in the affected regions.

A sharp drop in life expectancy, with HIV/AIDS the primary driver, has sent Namibia's human development indicators plummeting; gains in other areas will continue to be undermined by the epidemic unless treatment and prevention programmes are stepped up, a new report warns.

"The single greatest threat to the expansion of human capabilities in Namibia today remains the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which, through its impact on mortality, is undermining human development objectives," said 'Trends in Human Development and Human Poverty in Namibia', a report released by the United Nations Development programme (UNDP) on Wednesday.

The report presents recent findings on two main composite indices established by the UNDP for measuring quality of life and social progress: the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Human Poverty Index (HPI). "The analysis showed deterioration in both of the indices over time, reflecting an overall worsening in the essential capabilities of Namibians," the UNDP said.

"What we see happening here is that while two of three dimensions that make up the Human Development Index (HDI), related to income and education, have improved, the positive effect is more than outweighed by the fall in life expectancy, pulling the index down," Sebastian Levine, Senior Economist at UNDP in Namibia, told IRIN.

The real value of the average income of individuals has almost doubled since the early 1990s, from N$5,500 (US$810) to almost N$10,500 (US$ 1,540) in 2004, and educational attainment had also improved.

However, average life expectancy fell by more than 10 years since 1991, "A direct result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which represents the greatest cause of death in the country," the report commented.

"Southern Africa is the epicentre of the epidemic ... Namibia has one of the highest prevalence rates in the world," Levine said. According to UNAIDS, about 23 percent of Namibians aged between 15 and 49 are HIV-positive. The country has a population of 1.8 million.

Levine warned that despite impressive efforts to halt the spread of the epidemic, particularly on the treatment front, "prevention needs to be improved".

A free antiretroviral (ARV) programme, rolled out at government hospitals in 2004, now provides treatment to 33,000 of the 67,500 people in need of it.

An unequal society

"Namibia still ranks amongst the worst in the world in terms of distribution of income," Levine commented. At 0.6, the country has one of the highest Gini Coefficients in the world, he said. The Gini Coefficient uses a measurement between 0 and 1 to determine income distribution - the closer to 1, the more unequal a society; the closer to 0, the more equal a society.

The UNDP study also revealed great disparities in human development, with rural areas generally performing worse than urban areas, and men scoring higher than women.

But the greatest disparity was found among Namibia's language groups, reflecting profound difficulties in overcoming discrimination and exclusion based on ethnicity.

The report indicated that the HDI was highest among households where German and English were the main languages. "At par with levels in some of the most developed countries in the world," Levine said.

The households of the indigenous San people, who are Khoisan speakers, and RuKavango-speakers - a collective name for a number of related languages spoken in northeastern Namibia by about 9.7 percent of the population - ranked lowest, with an HDI comparable to some of the world's most deprived countries.

In a 2004 strategic paper titled 'Vision 2030', Namibia conceptualised its development objectives for improving the quality of life of its people to the level of their counterparts in developed world by the year 2030.

The report concluded that achieving these goals now heavily depended on "the effectiveness with which programmes to treat those with AIDS and prevent new HIV infections are implemented."

Namibia laid to rest a part of its apartheid past this week, when the remains of liberation fighters discovered in mass graves in the north of the country were reburied.

The bodies of guerrillas of the now-ruling South West Africa Peoples Organisation (SWAPO) were discovered in 2005 in Eenhana, near a former base of the South African Defence Force (SADF), which occupied Namibia until independence in 1990.

Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba, accompanied by the country's founding president, Sam Nujoma, recalled how SWAPO fighters were tortured and killed, and then buried outside the camp. "The discovery of the mass graves at Eenhana bears testimony to the brutality of the apartheid South African regime," he was reported as saying.

The reburial came in the midst of controversy over a Namibian human rights group's decision to file a request at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague to investigate Nujoma over the disappearance of thousands of people during and after the liberation struggle.

Phil ya Nangoloh, executive director of the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR), said he had been forced to lodge the request at the ICC after his repeated calls for the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), similar to the South African model, had gone unheeded by the government.

The NSHR blames SWAPO for the alleged disappearance of 4,200 people between 1959 and 2003, many of them detained by SWAPO for being alleged South African spies.

But ya Nangoloh's allegations, which equate the human rights record of the SWAPO leadership with the apartheid military, have triggered fury in the party. SWAPO Chief Whip Johnny Hakaye tabled a motion in the Namibian parliament last week to examine the legal status of the NSHR.

South African atrocities committed during the liberation war are well documented. The South African TRC, set up by former president Nelson Mandela to probe apartheid era abuses, found the SADF and Koevoet, a counter-insurgency police unit, guilty of gross human rights abuse in Namibia.

The Namibian government has consistently rejected calls for a local TRC process. Information minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah told IRIN in 2006 that at independence in 1990, SWAPO had signed an agreement with the then apartheid South African government not to take legal action against individuals for their role during the liberation war.

Ya Nangoloh insists that the TRC would be non-partisan. "As we have persistently done during the last 15 years, we reiterate our call for the establishment of a TRC to investigate all human rights violations committed in opposition to Namibian independence, and in the name of achieving such independence."

Call to regulate media

Meanwhile, the parliamentary motion on the NSHR has antagonised the Namibian media. SWAPO chief whip Hakaye also called for a body to regulate the media, which had reported ya Nangoloh's calls.

"When I came across the many writings of ya Nangoloh, mostly in the ... Windhoek Observer [a weekly newspaper], I said to myself, 'this is too much, uncalled for and unwarranted. Don't we have a law in this country to regulate these - both the human rights body, the Windhoek Observer, The Namibian, and the likes?'" Hakaye was quoted as saying in The Namibian, a daily newspaper.

Mathew Haikali, director of the Namibian chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a watchdog body, has hit back. "We have submitted a letter complaining to the government. We have been told that the motion has been referred to a standing committee. We will strongly oppose any attempts to regulate the media."

According to media reports, SWAPO officials have also indirectly served notice on the NSHR's donors, which include Nordic countries. "If the NSHR and its sponsors dare touch our national and historical treasure in the person of Nujoma, the time bomb will explode," Elijah Ngurare, a spokesman for the SWAPO Party Youth League, was quoted as saying earlier this month.

A spokesman for Finland's embassy in the capital, Windhoek, told IRIN that it funded the NSHR for the "purpose of monitoring and reporting human rights violations, [and] training on human rights issues, as an expression of support for a strong civil society, freedom of expression and for an open debate about human rights issues in Namibia."

However, this "does not mean that the embassy endorses or supports all comments made by the organisation [NSHR]; we feel the Namibian people should own the Namibian debate, and our work supports the principles of humans rights in general."

Two thirds of rape and attempted rape victims in Namibia know their perpetrators, a report released ahead of this month's national conference on violence against women and children said.

The report, 'Rape in Namibia', investigated how the promulgation of the Combating of Rape Act seven years ago was working in practice and noted that between 2000 and 2005 99 percent of reported rape victims were women.

"Only twelve percent of the cases clearly involved rapes by strangers," Dianne Hubbard, the report's author and the coordinator of the Gender Research and Advocacy Project of the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC, said at the launch of the study in the capital, Windhoek. "The vast majority of rapes in our study - at least 67 percent - involved persons known to the victim. Most shockingly, about 25 percent of the rapes in the sample involved family members, spouses or intimate partners, including past partners."

"If you say 'no' to sex to your boyfriend, he gets angry, even beats you and then you rather consent," 17-year old Laimi (not her real name), who was raped by her 22-year-old boyfriend, told IRIN.

As a five-year-old child, Laimi witnessed her seven-year-old sister being sexually abused at the family homestead. "It was an uncle from our village. I did not realise what he did then, but felt it was something dirty. My sister cried afterwards."

Reports of rape and attempted rape cases in Namibia doubled from 564 cases in 1991 to 1,184 cases in 2005, the report said, amounting to 60 reported cases per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 117 per 100,000 in neighbouring South Africa.

The LAC study research was compiled through the scrutiny of police data, 409 crime dockets, 547 rape cases on court registers and interviews with 58 key informants including police officers, prosecutors, lawyers, doctors and rape survivors.

"The increase in the number of reported rapes and attempted rapes could mean an increase in the number of cases being committed or an increase in the number of them reported. It could also be a mixture of these two factors," the study said.
The upswing in rape cases could also be attributed to the increasing number of police stations established since Namibia's independence in 1990, when 75 stations existed. This number had increased to 106 police stations by 2005, including 26 sub-stations and 15 Woman and Child Protection Units, and meant that it was easier for people to report crimes. About 60 percent of the country's two million people reside in rural areas.

Most rapes (68 percent) were reported promptly and the arrest rate was 70 percent, and served as an illustration that most rapists were known to their victims, the report said, which also said 13 percent of rapists were males under the age of 18.

Conviction rates

Of those arrested for rape, 40 percent resulted in a criminal trial, while one third of reported rape cases were withdrawn by the complainant. One of the reasons cited for withdrawal of charges was that complainants resorted to compensation under customary law, although this action could be pursued in tandem with criminal charges.

The conviction rate of rapists is 16 percent, the report said, which "could be improved but Namibia is doing a much better job than other countries. South Africa only has a 7 percent conviction rate, Germany 21 percent," Hubbard said.

Liz Frank, a gender activist and editor of the monthly magazine Sister Namibia, told IRIN that rape in Namibia was part of the "scarred" legacies of the apartheid system, which ended with independence, and the liberation struggle against it. "The armed struggle with the accompanied violence was regarded as something heroic," she told IRIN. "No proper reconciliation has taken place, wounds are unhealed and society has not worked through the psychological trauma of those periods."

At independence, Frank said, there was very high expectations of jobs, housing and economic benefits, which did not materialise, as the current 36 percent unemployment rate proves. "Women usually have tasks like bringing food daily on the table for the family, looking after the sick, but unemployed men have a lot of frustrations in them as well as young males like school drop outs. Taking 'possession' of the body of a woman or a girl during a rape act, creates a sense of power and being in charge," she said.

Among the report's recommendations was the establishment of victim support programmes, the prioritising on the court roll of rape cases involving children and harsher sentences for rapists if the victims had physical or mental disabilities.

The government's interference in the format of two popular and long-running radio phone-in programmes has provoked anger from listeners and criticism from free-speech organisations, which contend that the meddling is little more than censorship.

The morning programme, 'Chat Show', broadcast on the national radio service of the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), and 'Open Line', its sister programme in the evenings - both presented in English - have allowed the public to air their grievances and opinions on any topic they chose, provided the discourse was polite and without any profanity.

Both programmes have been running since Namibia gained independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, but a few days ahead of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May, Information and Broadcasting Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah told parliament that the programme's format would be changed because of instances of abuse by some callers.

"A topic will be given every programme by the radio presenter, and listeners who phone in may comment on that topic only," the minister said while presenting her department's budget.

In response, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), which has its headquarters in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, issued a statement, saying, "The right to speak freely, without fear of government reprisal, is at the very heart of democracy.

"This veiled attempt by the NBC management [to curb public debate] is therefore contemptuous and cannot be seen in any other light than the NBC heeding the call of its masters."

The change in format coincided with uncomfortable topics being raised on the NBC's Oshiwambo-language phone-in programmes, in which a succession of callers demanded that the country's founding president, Sam Nujoma, explain his alleged links with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), America's secret service.

The questions were sparked by a series of critical articles on Nujoma's autobiography, 'Where Others Wavered', written by human rights activist Phil ya Nangoloh and published in the local weekly newspaper, the Windhoek Observer.

According to Ya Nangoloh, the allegations of Nujoma's links with the CIA were gleaned from the recently published autobiography of Magnus Malan, a defence minister of apartheid South Africa, who wrote that Nujoma had been of "greater value" as an informer or collaborator of South Africa during Namibia's liberation struggle.
"The real reason behind the draconian measure to muzzle the call-in radio programmes is to suppress criticism of Nujoma in the run-up to the congress of the ruling SWAPO party later this year," said ya Nangoloh, who is executive director of the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR).

"The citizens' right to free, vibrant and natural, open and critical debate, as is necessary under our system of democracy, has been dealt a lethal blow by Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah. This is bound to be challenged," he said.

"When citizens are now being told what to say and when to say it, on the one hand, and what not say and when not to say it, on the other, then we should be sure that unacceptable restrictions have arrived," ya Nangoloh commented.

Freedom of expression is enshrined in the Namibian constitution, and Ya Nangoloh said the inference by government was "totally unconstitutional".

Paul Helmut, a community activist and regular contributor to the phone-in programmes, said this was "a step backwards" for democracy. "Under apartheid rule we could not say what we wanted, but for 17 years since independence we could discuss issues in those programmes, which I call the 'people's parliament'," Helmut told IRIN. "Now our own government has taken this platform away from us."

After the format changed, Bob Kandetu, director-general of the NBC, said while he was a studio guest on the programme that part of the blame regarding the "abuse" of some callers resided with the radio show's hosts. "Some were inexperienced and did not know when to stop a caller, or how to handle him when the contribution got off the track," he said.

The NBC's nine different language services all have call-in programmes, but only the Afrikaans and German services will continue broadcasting them with the format unchanged.