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Innocent Ruwende Senior Reporter
Namibian Minister of Information and Technology Mr Tjekero Tweya has urged Africans to be wary of Non-Governmental Organisations saying the majority of them serve the agenda of their Western funders. Minister Tweya said former United States Secretary of State and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2016 election, Mrs Hillary Clinton, had admitted that NGOs were front-runners of her country’s foreign policy in a book she authored.
“Have you had a chance to read a book by Hillary Clinton about NGOs? There clearly she is admitting that especially American NGOs are the front-runners of American foreign policy. They finance them and come to us as NGOs to get information to feed their own interest,” he said.
“The funders of the NGOs want to destroy what we stand for. We do not even realise it, some of us that are so educated. I am referring to those with high certificates of MBAs and PhDs do not even use that to analyse and understand what their (NGOs) purpose is.”
Minister Tweya urged Africans to use their intellect to “judge some of these things that are causing self-destruction to us.” He said Africans need to promote access to information for their own use and not to please foreign nations. Minister Tweya said access to information would enable citizens to participate in national issues.
He said Western countries do not want to accommodate Africa in governance issues and that is why they were resisting reforms at the United Nations. “The ongoing battle or war to reform the United Nations, other so-called analysts will say it is going to be a battle. Of course, it is going to be a battle. Why is it going to be a battle? It is because they have certain interests.”
“This relates to other agencies. What brought us here (Zimbabwe) is the Universal Postal Union. It is a UN agency and those agencies have the same attitude not to reform to allow new players, new nations to come in.
“They will always come up with excuses. Interestingly they had in the form of a chief executive like the director-general who is an African from Africa. He moved there and decided that he would not play along and proposed certain reforms only to realise that what he was proposing, the decisions are already there, but the implementers were not willing to implement,” he said.
Minister Tweya said he met a lot of resistance in trying to implement reforms and he shared the information with all the member states including Africans. The minister was speaking after a tour of Zimpapers and ZBC on Thursday.
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