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NAMIBIA: Anger as Zim judge assigned country’s biggest corruption case
By Namibian Press
OPPOSITION parties in Namibia have expressed outrage over the appointment of Justcie Moses Chinhengo to the High Court and his subsequent assignment to handle the country’s biggest corruption and racketeering case.
Chinhengo becomes the second Zimbabwean judge appointment to face criticism after similar concerns were expressed when Justice Rita Makarau joined the Supreme Court bench in Namibia earlier this year.
Namibia Judge President Petrus Damaseb announced the appointment of Chinhengo as an Acting Judge at the Windhoek High Court and after which it was also revealed that he would preside over the Fishrot fraud, corruption and racketeering trial.
The scandal – named after a 2019 Wikileaks release called the “Fishrot Files” – stretches from Namibia to Iceland involving at least $20m.
A number of prominent politicians, including former cabinet ministers and businessmen, are accused of running schemes to get control of valuable fishing quotas held by the state fishing company Fishcor. It is alleged that they then diverted them to an Icelandic fishing company in return for kickbacks.
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Some opposition political parties, among them the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) and the Affirmative Repositioning Movement (ARM), have however expressed disquiet over Justice Chinhengo’s appointment.
“The Zimbabwean judge issue; we’ll really have to investigate… there are others from Zimbabwe who fled and said we’ve had enough of this nonsense,” LPM leader Bernadus Swartbooi said.
“Professor Walter Kamba, when [Robert] Mugabe started interfering in the University of Zimbabwe, he decided to go, and he was called by [Peter] Katjavivi and founded the faculty of law [at the University of Namibia], for which at some stage he was dean of the faculty. There are those good Zimbabweans who decided out of their conscience to come and play a good role.”
He added; “But others are here on a mission. They are mercenaries.
“You can be clothed in a judicial dress, with a black gown, projected up there, and we can call you ‘my lord’, but you know that you don’t have a soul, whether you are called a ‘lord’, you know you are a dirty man, even if you’re in black.”
“Everything has its time. Every end is predictable. I hope the Zimbabwean judge will not be appointed for the genocide case.”
Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement’s head of legal Maitjituavi Kavetu said they were also concerned about the lack of transparency in judicial appointments.
He explained; “in November 2020, we petitioned the JSC to be more transparent in their operations.
“But the JSC seems to have continued with their lack of transparency in the appointment of judges. In order to pay lip service to our demands, only the Ombudsman’s interview was done in public to date”.
He added; “Vacancies on the High Court bench or Supreme Court bench remain a secret to the public.
“Any judge appointed in a manner which doesn’t include public interviews or announcements of vacancies can never receive the blessings and confidence of the public or the leftist movement.
Continuing, Kavetu said their concern was not about the individual judges appointed, but the process.
The process, he added, “is rather too secretive, and the fact that they seem to insist on the secretive process makes us wonder whether the Namibian people will even see justice in the Fishrot case, especially with a judge coming from Zimbabwe, when one considers that country’s judicial reputation and the Namibian history regarding one of the judges who was appointed in the north [Maphios Cheda].”
In 2018, AR organised the #ChedaMustFall demonstration against former Zimbabwean High Court Justice Cheda, who is embroiled in a nasty land row in Oshakati.