Making A Better World - Milton Louw

  The Namibian reported in the edition of 11 June 2018 ( https://www.namibian.com.na/68242/read/SSC-leak-exposes-personal-info-online ), about the data leak noticed last week on the website of the Social Security Commission (SSC). The reporters that took up the story were able to alert the appropriate staff and the data leak was closed on Sunday, 10 June 2018. As the leak has now been closed, the following is an overview of the occurrence and what should have been done to prevent such events in other organisations. The Director of the Namibia Consumer Protection Group (NCPG), Milton LOUW, is an IT expert and owner of Aardvark Investments, a company that often undertakes tracing for insurance companies wishing to trace people who are due monies but their contact details are no longer current. On Thursday 7 June 2018, a routine search for “Box 1141, Oshakati” showed the following results on Google. Clicking on this link opened up the following page. Once in this directory, there are...

One of the biggest problems in starting a family is that most of the things I want, such as furniture, motor vehicle, etc. costs more money than what I earn in a month. The only option for purchasing these high cost items is to either save or to take it on credit. For myself, I have learned the hard way that it is better to save and buy later, rather than purchase on credit and not be able to afford the monthly payments later. Unfortunately, most consumers still prefer to buy on credit and can find themselves borrowing recklessly and then becoming “over-indebted”. In many countries of the world, a law has been enacted as a National Credit Act that promotes an effective, fair and accessible credit market and to help protect consumers from “reckless lending” and “over-indebtedness”. Unfortunately, Namibia has not yet enacted many such consumer laws yet. Under such a credit environment, debt counselling is included as a tool to help consumers get out from under debt. These debt counsello...

  List No. 4 is being released on 1 September 2023 All  Pension Funds in Namibia must in the month of January each year publish statements of benefits that have remain unclaimed for a period of five years or more in terms of section 93(1) of the Administration of Estates Act, 1965 (Act No. 66 of 1965) in the Government Gazette. NAMFISA has noted in 2019 that not all funds have been publishing these lists as required and is busy enforcing this.  Several funds are using the Consumer Registration Database of over 1 million records and have had some success in tracing these members or their beneficiaries. A database has also been created to capture all the data from thepublishezd Gazettes since the early 1970’s. It is expected that by February 2023, this database will be available to the public. You can search to see if you or your family are beneficiaries of unclaimed monies: GIPF:  https://www.gipf.com.na/member-benefits/unclaimed-benefits/ Sanlam:  https://milton...

Namibia does not yet have a legal framework to protect personal details such as full names, date of birth and personal contact details. In fact, many businesses and government departments are not even trained in what is considered personal information. Take for example the website of the Law Society of Namibia (LSN). On its “Find a Firm or Practitioner” page (https://lawsocietynamibia.org/find-a-firm-or-practitioner/), it shows public information in a browser window, namely Name, Surname, Designation and Industry. If, however you investigate the coding of the page, it will also give you the Full Names, Date of Birth, and Personal Cellular Number of all its members.   The ability to save information on a computer and share this electronically necessitates legislation to be promulgated that protects the abuse of this information. These laws are especially necessary in our Information and Communication enabled society where information is stored on electronic retrieval systems....