Making A Better World - Milton Louw

First posted in New Era - 29 June 2016 Imagine waking up one morning and finding out that a relative left you some money you did not know about? Have you had that dream? The insurance industry in Namibia is estimated to have over 2 billion dollars’ worth of unclaimed monies due to dependants of deceased persons. No accurate figures have been compiled, but industry experts predict that this relates to over 40,000 people who have money that belongs to them, but they do not know about it. The financial industry refers to these “unfound people” as dependants and make efforts, such as newspaper adverts, to find them. However, the longer the period of time has passed since the fund contributor died, the harder it gets to find a dependant. Namibia has no home delivery postal service and there exists no national database of residential property and their occupants to enable NamPost to do door-to-door deliveries. This lack of residential information has also led to expensive exercises to r...

Let us be blunt. White male privilege was how things were. In 1780, less than 3% of the population (all male) were allowed to vote. By 1832, only one in seven white males had the right to vote. This was because the law stipulated you had to owned land worth ore than ten pounds. Woman older than 30 only got the vote in 1918. This same fight for universal suffrage has continued in Namibia (and South Africa) with non-white males and females only getting the vote at Independence. Now I hear white males complaining that they are now being discriminated against. REALLY? The fight for equal rights and equal opportunities while the skewed allocation of the past still exists is something we as a nation have to work towards. Acting the injured party does not help - the fight has been won and you need to join the rest of us working towards equitable sharing of our resources - even if this means government intervention must be used.

MTC has introduced Differential Data Pricing without consulting the regulator or consumers. Recently the telecommunications industry have seen the mushrooming of over the top (OTT) content providers as a threat to their business model. OTT refers to delivery of audio, video, and other media over the Internet without the involvement of a multiple-system operator in the control or distribution of the content - in other words the consumer chooses a data service not provided by the telco service provider. In South Africa the dominant service providers, (Vodacom and MTN), have instigated a parliamentary debate and are doing their best to introduce hurdles to customers using services such as WhatsApp and Facebook arguing that these services do not pay tax or contribute to the actual infrastructure that customers use. This debate is however not about services being offered - but rather the threat of losing revenue from voice and SMS. One of the options being put forward is th...

PUBLIC COMMENTS IN RESPECT OF MTC’S NEW NETMAN PRODUCTS (NETMAN TURBOBOOST) TARIFFS AS PUBLISHED ON 24 DECEMBER 2015 IN THE GOVERNMENT GAZETTE NO. 5908 GENERAL NOTICE 568 Allow me to first state that it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to be involved in the process of tariff determinations and other matters before CRAN as there are no consumer organization receiving funds to assist them in doing work on behalf of the consumer. Most consumer activists are doing the work on behalf of consumers only when the time allows and thus we will find that big corporations will increasingly get away with unfair business practices. Perhaps CRAN should consider the idea of using funds from the Universal Service Fund to assist consumer organisations with their activities. The Namibia Consumer Protection Group (NCPG) requests CRAN to have public hearings on MTC’S new NETMAN products (NETMAN Turboboost) tariffs as published on 24 December 2015 in the Government Gazette NO. 5908 ...

Namibia held its Regional Council and Local Authority elections on 27th November 2015. Probably the biggest lesson for the country is that so few voters (less than 40%) bothered to participate even after it was declared a public holiday. In the Regional Council election, each voter is expected to vote for an individual and it is easy for comparisons to be made between the individuals and the parties they represent. HOWEVER, our Local Authority elections are based on the party list system  - and very few voters even know who the candidates are they are voting for when they press the button next to their party of choice. Looking at the results from the Local Authority election, I am reminded of a quote from Henry George in 1833: "Much, too, may be done to restrict the abuse of party machinery, and make the ballot the true expression of the will of the voter, by simplifying our elective methods. And a principle should always be kept in mind which we have largely ignored, that the pe...

For the past three years, I have been working at the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) as the IT Project Coordinator responsible for establishing the electronic voters register. As an employee of ECN, I felt that I should restrict myself from writing about politics or electoral matters as  matter of principle. Thus my regular readers will note that I have largely written only about consumer issues and left out my usual weekly political commentary from my blog.  I resigned from ECN on 30 September and will now continue with this blog (which started in January 2009) as part of my contribution to a better Namibia.

(First appeared in New Era 16 September 2015) A few years ago my eldest daughter called me during a training session I held in the capital. At the time I was freelancing and training officials at a large OMA about how to use Facebook. When my daughter heard this she had to express incredulity and stated, “But how do you teach something which is so easy to use?” She was of course mistaking using the social media platform with managing the platform and the interaction you can have with the system when understanding how your followers or “likers” react to posts and photographs. I of course had to protect my business model and had to explain to her the difference. In essence, posting comment, publishing pictures or commenting on posts is all easy to do and allows your friends to see where you are, when and with whom. However, you want to know more about the people seeing your posts entails a lot more work in the actual engine room of the programme. Thus I was training managers of inform...