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EDITORIAL: Govt must pay out SME Bank depositors

The Namibian government needs to come out of hiding and help SME Bank depositors, who have lost millions of their investments in that bank. The SME Bank was owned by the government, through the company Namibia Financing Trust, which held 65%.

Since 2017, those who had their money held in the bank as deposits have not been paid. In fact, they are now being told to essentially forget that they ever held money in that bank.

Yesterday, a group of disgruntled depositors said they have been told that for every dollar they had deposited, they will only receive five cents. This means those who deposited N$1 000 would only receive N$50. Instead of paying school fees, they must buy onions for a night’s dinner.

This is criminality of industrial proportions – yet not a single soul is behind bars for their treasonous acts.

It is a rip-off, enabled by the majority shareholder – our elected government on whose watch the looting occurred. They cannot hide behind legal bushes to exonerate themselves from this liability.

Their foreign partners - Metropolitan Bank of Zimbabwe, which held 30%, and Worldeagle Properties, which held the remaining 5% - have run back to their country. But our leaders are here, begging for our votes again without an iota of shame.

Where is their empathy and accountability? How do they sleep at night knowing there are people whose only crime was to ditch foreign-owned banks and patriotically deposit their hard-earned cash into what was paraded as a truly Namibian institution, with the state as its anchor shareholder?

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Namibian Sun 2024-11-23

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