Tungeni Dam Resort

Twenty-two shelters and a golf course that never came

Before 2008 the state resort at Von Bach was barely a resort. John Grobler, who dug into the place for The Namibian in June 2009, listed what Namibia Wildlife Resorts had there: 22 basic shelters, a shared ablution block and ten campsites with braai stands. People came to launch a boat, not to sleep well.

Count the rooms at the lodge today and you get 22 again, eleven chalets and eleven bungalows. The number is about all that survived.

Signed on 17 July 2008

Cabinet approved the idea of putting private partners into state rest camps on 22 June 2006. The company that became Tungeni Africa had been registered three weeks earlier, on 1 June. Its contract for Von Bach was signed on 17 July 2008, in one package with three fishing camps on the Atlantic coast (Mile 72, Mile 108 and Jakkalsputz). The Namibian spent much of 2009 asking who stood behind the company, and reported that the land had never been transferred to NWR by title deed in the first place.

The people who felt it first were the water-skiers. Two clubs had each rented five hectares on the shore from the Department of Works since the mid-1970s. In April 2009 the game warden, Penda Shimali, locked them out, and they went to court for an urgent interdict. The managing director, Iyaloo Nangolo, was blunt with Grobler about motives: the company was there to make a profit.

That quarrel never ended. In April 2022 the government gave the clubs a fresh concession running to December 2041, and Tungeni went to the High Court over 30.5 hectares that both sides say are theirs.

The village across the water

The lodge was only ever meant to be the small half of the plan. The big half was Oujere Lifestyle Village: houses for sale on long leases, a golf course, marinas, horse riding. The size of it changed with every telling. It was 240 houses in 2009, 77 by the time the lodge opened, and 300 units in the company’s court papers, which say building should have run from 2015 to 2017.

Sam Nujoma, the founding president, opened the finished lodge on Friday 14 October 2011 and called the village an innovative idea. By then more than 3,000 guests had stayed since the doors opened the previous December. In 2015 the resort took the prizes for tourism and hospitality and for best food outlet at the Okahandja trade expo.

The houses are another matter. The latest court papers I can find, from 2022 and 2023, still describe them in the future tense.

Why you can’t braai at your chalet

The water people hated the village from the start. Dr Stefan de Wet, the director of water affairs until he retired in March 2009, had told the developers at a meeting the previous October that the plan was “fatally flawed”. This is the main tap for Windhoek, the dam was already rich in nutrients, and his department had warned more than once about overflowing septic tanks at the old state bungalows. There was also talk at NamWater of raising the wall by ten metres, which would have put lakeside plots under water.

I read the lodge’s strictest house rule against that background. The rebuilt resort runs on a water recycling system, and the operator says it cannot cope with food residue, chemicals, plastics, wool or cotton. So nobody cooks at the rooms, and fires are kept to marked braai spots at the campsite on the eastern side of the dam and at the adventure centre. Hard luck for self-caterers, but the water in front of the lodge is on its way to somebody’s kitchen tap.

One oddity from the same year: alongside the lodge, Tungeni was reported to have won a five-year hunting concession in the reserve. I have found no word on whether it was ever used.