Accept Foreign Qualifications

ALLOW me a space in your widely read newspaper to critically share my disappointment with the responsible and realistic members of the public about the monopolistic behaviours of the Namibian Qualification Authority and the Engineering Council of Namibia.

Upon completing my four-year study period in the engineering field in Europe, I went to the Namibian Qualification Authority (NQA) to get my qualifications (which according to them are unknown) evaluated. But until now, since July last year, my qualifications are still in their ‘pending’ shelves and all my efforts to secure clarity from them on the issue has been in vain.To add insult to the injury, the Engineering Council of Namibia (ECN) (the body which was supposed to represent all engineers in the country) did not have even an idea of what marine engineering is all about. They went on to suggest that a marine engineer should have covered port constructions, jetty constructions, etc; a clear indication that there is a serious misinterpretation of marine engineering and a misunderstanding between marine architecture and marine engineering and perhaps this should not be a surprise to some of us because most, if not all, of the evaluators at the NQA and the ECN are electrical engineers, surveyors or structural engineers who do the evaluation just as an extra job when they are free from their full-time jobs.It also came to my knowledge that none of the Namibian marine engineers currently serving in ships within Namibian waters are registered with the ECN and the blame should be put directly at the doors of the office of the National Planning Commission which says all the people in Namibia doing engineering work should be registered, but the ECN is allowed to run its own show without accounting to anyone.The NQA and the ECN have been unfairly dictating and discriminating against foreign qualifications especially if they were obtained outside South Africa, and they only evaluate and recognise qualifications from the institutions they know. That’s why they have so called known qualifications and unknown qualifications.They spend unnecessary time questioning the legitimacy of qualifications while some qualifications were obtained through scholarships offered by foreign governments of which their embassies can easily be contacted if they have any doubt. Finally I need to know who run the NQA and the ECN because they are, to me, a private firm that represents the few and with a vision and targets only known to them.As long as our government continues to send students overseas for studies and people continue to speak about vision 2030, we should ask ourselves how many engineers, blacks for that matter, have been produced so far and how many of those are registered with the ECN.Concerned EngineerWalvis Bay

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