Biwa sues to stop NAC hearing

By: WERNER MENGES

THE suspended chief executive officer of the Namibia Airports Company, Ben Biwa, has asked the Labour Court in Windhoek to put a stop to an imminent disciplinary hearing in which he is set to face charges.

An urgent application in which Biwa is asking for an interdict to stop the disciplinary hearing, which was scheduled for Thursday last week, was filed with the Labour Court early on Thursday.
Biwa wants the court to stop the disciplinary hearing until a dispute which he has registered with the Office of the Labour Commissioner has been dealt with. He lodged a dispute with the labour commissioner on Wednesday.
Biwa was suspended from his post as CEO of the Namibia Airports Company (NAC) on November 8 last year. He is continuing to receive his salary while on suspension.
Biwa is also asking the court to order the NAC to continue paying him his full salary, after a request from him for a postponement of his disciplinary hearing was met with a suggestion from the company that the payment of his salary should then be stopped.
With the NAC’s lawyer, Sakeus Akweenda, disputing that Biwa’s application had to be heard as a matter of urgency, Acting Judge Esi Schimming-Chase heard arguments only on the issue of the urgency of the matter on Friday.
She reserved her ruling after hearing arguments from Akweenda and Ronald Kurtz, who represented Biwa.
Akweenda argued that the application was not urgent, or that it was a matter of self-created urgency.
He pointed out that Biwa was notified of his disciplinary hearing on January 24. Since then, he has made enquiries about the names of the witnesses who would be testifying at the hearing and about the sanctions that could be imposed at the end of the hearing, indicating that he was still interested in the hearing, Akweenda argued.
Only on Wednesday – the day before the hearing – did Biwa then lodge a complaint with the labour commissioner, which he now wants to be dealt with before the hearing takes place, Akweenda said.
He asked the judge to strike Biwa’s application from the court roll for a lack of urgency.
Kurtz argued that Biwa has been trying to resolve some issues with the NAC before the disciplinary hearing was to start. It was only at the beginning of last week that it became clear that the issues would not be cleared up, and that the urgency of the matter before the court arose, he argued.
Kurtz said the issues Biwa was trying to have resolved included the fact that the NAC’s disciplinary code does not make provision for disciplinary proceedings against the company’s chief executive officer, with no indication of who would handle an appeal if the CEO is dissatisfied with the outcome of the hearing.
Kurtz said Biwa’s first dispute referred to the labour commissioner was in connection with his suspension, with the second complaint being about an alleged unilateral change in his conditions of service with respect to the gap in the company’s disciplinary code where it concerns the CEO.
Before he was suspended Biwa was offered three months’ salary and asked to resign from his post, Kurtz reminded the court. When Biwa refused that offer, he was then suspended.
Biwa has found himself in stormy waters during his tenure at the NAC, with a controversial restructuring of the company, decided on before he took up his post, implemented under his watch.
The restructuring ended the employment of all NAC employees except the CEO, with employees given new contracts when they were then re-employed.

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