The Walvis Bay Municipal Council has recommended that a qualified consultant internal auditor be appointed to provide internal audit support services to the municipality.

The internal auditor will be required to audit all the departmental functions within the municipality for the minimum and maximum periods of one and three years respectively, by testing the existing internal controls to ensure that they are not idle, or at the same time, to implement new internal controls and/or improve on existing internal controls.

This is contained in the council agenda and was announced during a council meeting held at the municipality Tuesday night. It followed a meeting held on 18 October requesting council’s approval for such an appointment.

“Since the resignation of a permanent auditor in 2008, the position of internal auditor has been vacant. These services were later outsourced to an unqualified bookkeeping firm and it was later terminated in 2016 due to fraudulent actions conducted by this firm which come to the attention of council,” the document noted.

Council members indicated that it is important to acquire an internal auditor that will maintain an independent attitude toward co-workers, seeing that all areas within the organisation are up for audit.

NAMPA

2 (KANO, 02 NOV, AFP) – A criminal gang has kidnapped nearly 40 children working on a farm in northwest Nigeria and demanded ransom for their release, police and a local official said yesterday.

Dozens of gunmen on motorcycles stormed a farm outside Mairuwa village in Faskari district of Katsina State on Sunday and rounded up 39 children who were harvesting crops for a fee, the police and the official said.

Katsina is one of several states in the northwest and central Nigeria that are terrorised by criminal gangs locally known as called bandits, who raid villages, killing and abducting residents as well as looting and burning homes.

Hostages are usually released after ransom payment to the gangs, who reputedly hole up in the vast Rugu forest straddling Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and Niger states.

‘Bandits invaded a farm in Mairuwa and took away underaged labourers working on the farm,’ said Gambo Isah, Katsina police spokesman.

AFP

3 (ADDIS ABABA, 02 NOV, XINHUA) – The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has warned that more districts are at risk amid the ongoing cholera outbreak in the southeastern part of Ethiopia as cases grow.

The cholera outbreak is currently active in 23 localities of three districts of the Bale zone in the Oromia region, as well as in nine localities in one district of the Liban zone in the Somali region, the UNOCHA said in its latest situation update issued late Tuesday.

Figures from the OCHA indicated that as of October 25, some 273 cholera cases have been reported including nine deaths. It said suspected cases in East Bale are under investigation.

The caseload has increased by 30 per cent since October 10 with new daily cases reported in Berbere and Kersadula districts, it said.

The UNOCHA, which warned that additional districts are at risk of an outbreak, said that the ongoing response is hindered by insufficient funding and partners’ presence.

XINHUA

4 (COPENHAGEN, 02 NOV AFP) – Denmark’s left-wing Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen yesterday kicked off the process of forming a new, broader government one day after scoring a narrow election victory.

The Social Democrats, the largest party in parliament with 50 of 179 seats and accustomed to leading minority governments, now want to govern across the political divide after Frederiksen secured their best election win since 2001.

‘It will be very, very difficult. We don’t know if it will be possible, but we will try our utmost’, she told a party debate on Wednesday.

Earlier in the day, the prime minister formally presented the resignation of her outgoing government to Queen Margrethe.

The leaders of Denmark’s 11 other parties in parliament were each meeting the queen individually yesterday before the monarch formally tasks Frederiksen with trying to form a new government.

AFP

5 (SAO PAULO, 02 NOV, AFP) – Thousands of Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters called yesterday for the Brazilian military to intervene and keep the right-wing president in power after he lost re-election over the weekend to leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

After days of silence, Bolsonaro on Tuesday gave a short speech in which he neither accepted defeat nor congratulated Lula on his win, though his chief of staff took the podium afterwards to say the president had ‘authorized’ the transition to a new government.

Since then, his supporters have rallied in front of military installations in Brazil’s major cities to call for action.

‘Federal intervention now!’ chanted some of the thousands who gathered in front of the Southeastern Military Command in the Latin American country’s biggest city, Sao Paulo, on Wednesday.

Another demonstration along Sao Paulo’s Paulista Avenue was also planned for later in the day.

Source: The Namibian Press Agency