Once considered a ticket to a first-class seat on the state gravy train, Namibia’s 53 state-owned enterprises have become a career graveyard and several of them are now struggling to attract decent management.
The Government Institutions Pension Fund, the country’s largest, the state resort operator Namibia Wildlife Resorts and the Namibia Petroleum Corporation are all being run by officials in an acting capacity after their predecessors departed under a cloud.
Several of the former managing directors are either facing criminal inquiries or have had their careers destroyed by damning disciplinary hearings that laid bare the extent of the incompetence and political interference that have brought most of them to the edge of bankruptcy.
Late last week, the state railway operator joined the queue of headless state-owned enterprises when TransNamib summarily dismissed its chief executive, Titus Haimbili, and chief operations officer, Charles Funda. It emerged that the company had lost about R440-million to fraud, double billing, ghost employees and fraudulent payment of salaries.
On Tuesday, Haimbili and Funda lost an urgent application in the high court to be reinstated and were effectively ordered by acting Judge Kobus Miller to join the long queues of aggrieved ex-employees at the Labour Court to lodge a case against unfair dismissal.
End of the track
It is not clear whether this will be the end of the track for Haimbili, who in 2009 was cleared of six charges of corruption and mismanagement by an internal disciplinary committee after factions of ruling -party Swapo waded into the fray.
What followed was a public tit for tat of leaked reports played out in the media.
This time, Haimbili’s foes appear to have the upper hand: a confidential report showed rampant corruption at the railway operator. A lack of management control has allowed even the lowliest receptionist access to central accounting files, which allowed staff to create accounts that were often paid hundreds of times on the same unnumbered invoices.
Insider syndicates appeared to have a free hand in processing fictitious invoices and diverting those to own their accounts — 307 vendors “supplying” the company shared bank accounts with 304 employees — and nine managers were being paid up to R22000 too much a month.
Accumulated losses exceeded R500-million for the two years since Haimbili was reinstated, reports based on leaked correspondence between the board and Works and Transport Minister Errki Nghimtina stated.
The train smash at TransNamib is the latest in a series of crises at the parastatals, a sector that grew from only three at the time of independence in 1990 to 53 now.
Biggest disappointment
The state-owned enterprises fall roughly into three categories: statutory ones, those with a regulatory function and those that provide services, such as Air Namibia. Most were created during former president Sam Nujoma’s last two terms in office (from 1994 to 2004) when parastatals became as much a policy tool as a political patronage machine to reward deserving loyalists.
Although generally the regulatory enterprises have not been able to sink too deeply in the red, those that were supposed to generate state revenue have been the biggest disappointment.
Of the three companies spun out of the former department of transport, only Namport has been able to show steady growth and fiscal discipline. But the state has had to guarantee more than R1.5-billion in loans to Air Namibia, forming the bulk of about R4.5-billion in loans it has had to underwrite.
As a source of revenue and the rendering of essential social services otherwise regarded as economically unfeasible, the state-owned enterprises have been disappointing. Their subsidies have taken 10.39% of all state expenditure between 2000 and 2010 with little show for it other than a constant source of scandals.
Only four have shown any profit over the past few years. The most recently available information from the ministry of finance showed that the Bank of Namibia, Namport, the Diamond Control Board and Namibia Telecom contributed 94% of all such revenue between 2009 and 2010, with 82% percent of that coming from the Bank of Namibia.
Put another way, during the period 2000 to 2010, the state-owned enterprises received R1.2-billion in subsidies (excluding emergency bailouts) and gave back only about R173.4-million.
The ministry of finance estimated that during the period 2011 to 2013, the parastatals would need an additional R3-billion to meet expected service delivery targets, but, given the TransNamib disaster, it is likely to rise sharply.