LONG-SERVING Government official Jakes Jacobs has been appointed to fill the highest position in the Secretariat to the National Assembly.
Jacobs served as Director: General Services in the Secretariat and took over in an acting capacity three months ago from the previous Secretary, Nama Goabab, who was asked to leave.
‘I appointed Mr Jacobs with effect from January 5 2009,’ the Speaker, Theo-Ben Gurirab, said in a statement yesterday.
Goabab was only 23 months in the job. He and a senior accounting official at the National Assembly, Abraham George, are facing a court case after being arrested in June 2007 for allegedly contravening section 43 of the Anti-Corruption Act.
That section makes it an offence for any public official to directly or indirectly use ‘his or her office or position in a public body to obtain any gratification, whether for the benefit of himself or herself or any other person’.
Goabab had been receiving a monthly car allowance as part of his salary as Secretary to the National Assembly (NA). It is alleged that at the same time that he was receiving the allowance, Goabab was renting a car, and that he instructed the NA’s Chief Accountant to authorise the payment of the car rental out of public funds.
Goabab allegedly ordered Abraham to issue a cheque of about N$18 000 to pay for the car rental with taxpayers’ money.
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