WEEKENDER'S ROAST: The burden of being called Noa, even without an h

Maybe it was never a coincidence that the Anti-Corruption Commission headquarters in Windhoek resembles an ark. Although it is made of concrete and glass rather than gopher wood, that distinctive building on the corner of Mont Blanc and Groot Tiras streets in Eros, standing prominently above Robert Mugabe Avenue, has had a Noa at the helm for the past twenty years.

Whether the architects intended it or not, the symbolism is difficult to ignore. One Noah built an ark to save humanity from a flood, while Namibia's Noa spent two decades working from what looks remarkably like one, trying to save public institutions from a flood of corruption. The biblical Noah was instructed to preserve life after a world consumed by wickedness had reached breaking point, while Paulus Noa was entrusted with building an institution that would preserve public confidence by confronting another kind of moral decay. Neither assignment came with an instruction manual, and neither involved working with people who readily accepted that they needed saving.

The similarities become even more intriguing when one considers that the biblical Noah spent years warning people about a disaster they refused to believe was coming, patiently preaching righteousness while the rest of society carried on eating, drinking, marrying and dismissing him as though tomorrow would always resemble yesterday. When the flood finally arrived, it was too late to debate whether the ark had been necessary.

Paulus Noa's frustration, as he prepares to leave office after almost twenty years, is that he never enjoyed the luxury of such finality. Instead of floodwaters settling the argument, he says investigators could spend months painstakingly gathering evidence, establish misconduct beyond a reasonable doubt and recommend disciplinary action, only for those recommendations to be quietly ignored because the law carries no meaningful sanction against accounting officers who choose not to act. In other words, the biblical Noah struggled to convince people to board the ark, while the Namibian Noa says he sometimes struggled to convince those entrusted with accountability even to acknowledge that the ark existed.

One cannot help imagining how differently the biblical account might have unfolded under the same legal framework. Noah would probably have completed construction, submitted a recommendation that the animals board two by two, circulated the proposal for public comment, waited for legal opinions, established a technical committee to determine whether giraffes should embark before elephants, invited the zebras to a stakeholder consultation and then hoped the heavens delayed the rain until every administrative process had finally run its course.

Some people inherit a name and others inherit a mission. The two men are separated by thousands of years, yet both found themselves trying to rescue societies that seemed remarkably comfortable resisting rescue.

The biblical Noah eventually watched the waters recede and knew his mission had succeeded. The Namibian Noa leaves behind an institution that resembles an ark and carries his fingerprints everywhere, yet whether history will say he succeeded remains uncertain, because, unlike floodwaters, corruption rarely announces when it has been defeated. It simply changes clothes, finds another office and waits for the next Noa to come along.