Namibia and Milton Louw 28 December 2019

Dear people who care about me, the consumers of Namibia,

My humble apologies.

Over the past 20 years it has been my honour of being the custodian of your personal digital information.

I have on a laptop in the possession of the Namibian Police a software program I wrote in 2004 called the "Namibian Consumer Database".

In that database of over 3 million records I have stored the following personal digital information if the people in it.

They are:

• Voters Register of Namibia 1999 (VRS99)
• City of Windhoek debtors book 2003
• Namibian Taxpayers Excel Sheet not dated
• Voters Register of Namibia 2009
• Nambiz database 1999, 2004, 2013
• Box holders of Nampost

Thank you for the honour and the understanding.

We in the world, and very much so here in Namibia, (where I reside with my Captain Adorable), need:

• Consumer Protection Act
• Privacy and Data Protection
• Protection of Personal Digital Information

I believe in standards.

I thank you.

Milton (whose turning 50 tomorrow 😇)

How Government should intervene in the financial sector

I have just received a briefing paper from the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik / German Development Institute concerning "The potential of pro-market activism as a tool for making finance work for Africa: a political economy perspective".

The author argues that:
"This suggests that information on creditworthiness is basically a public good, in the sense that it is non-rival in consumption and it is very costly to exclude anyone from using it. When the market fails to let banks appropriate the returns of information about their costumers, banks will under-invest in the acquisition of such information.
.....
Credit registries give access to clients’ credit history and increase the transparency of borrower quality, which makes it safer for financial institutions to lend to new customers.
.......
The Kenyan Central Bank (CBK) took the initiative and issued a regulation which mandated financial institutions to share information with credit bureaus."

They are funded by Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (BMZ) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH. The project this is done under is called "Making Finance Work for Africa (MFW4A)" copyof the paper can be found oline at http://www.die-gdi.de/CMS-Homepage/openwebcms3.nsf/(ynDK_contentByKey)/ANES-8DNAK4/$FILE/DP%202.2011.pdf