Urban and rural development minister James Sankwasa has questioned why the Helao Nafidi Town Council continues to employ a 70-year-old chief executive officer (CEO) at a time when the country is facing high youth unemployment.
Current CEO Inge Ipinge (70), who is president Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah’s younger sister, reached the retirement age of 60 in 2015.
Her employment contract has been extended twice, with the last extension in July 2021, when she was 66 years old, taking her term to August 2026.
This is despite the legal retirement age for local authority employees being 60.
Sankwasa told The Namibian yesterday that “it is uncalled for” for any local authority to employ a 70-year-old CEO when there are qualified people without jobs.
“There is no way in Namibia, with such high unemployment, you can struggle to get a CEO. It is not possible and it is not convincing.
Employing a 70-year-old person when the nation is crying for you is also uncalled for. It is just bad blood for that,” he said.
The town council advertised the CEO position earlier this year and the shortlisted candidates were interviewed on 2 September.
However, last week and yesterday, the council re-advertised the position in local print media.
Helao Nafidi mayor Darius Shaalukeni has confirmed that the position has been re-advertised due to flaws in the interview process.
“I have not been around, but I know it was resolved that the position must be re-advertised. I don’t know the details of what was wrong with the interview process,” he says.
Contacted for comment yesterday, Ipinge referred The Namibian to the mayor.
“Please call the mayor,” she said.
When contacted for comment again, Shaalukeni said he was in a meeting and would get back soon. He also did not respond to text messages sent to him at the time of going to print.
In 2021, Helao Nafidi Town Council minutes recorded that town councillors argued that appointing a new CEO at that time would disrupt administration as they were still in the process of familiarising themselves with the affairs of the council.
They further said should the council appoint an acting CEO from its employees, the “appointed officer may suffer”.
The council’s management committee chairperson, Sakaria Haimbili, declined to comment and referred all queries to the mayor.
According to the re-advertisement, the successful candidate will earn a salary on a scale ranging from N$455 400 to N$473 800 per annum.
The successful candidate will also receive a motor vehicle allowance of N$123 600 per year, a housing allowance of N$91 000, a housing subsidy of N$182 000 payable upon submission of a bond registration certificate, a cellphone allowance of N$14 000 per year, and a 13th cheque of N$37 000.
Medical aid and pension contributions will be made in line with council provisions.
Applicants must have a recognised degree, preferably in business, public administration, accounting, finance, commerce, economics, local government, civil engineering, or town and regional planning at National Qualification Framework (NQF) Level 8.
A master’s degree in any of these fields will be an added advantage.
Candidates should have at least nine years of appropriate experience, of which five years must have been spent at a senior managerial or executive level.
The Namibian reported in July that at the time, 16 local authorities were operating without substantive CEOs.
Sankwasa has labelled this as a failure of the political leadership of these local authorities, and has pledged to deal with the situation before the upcoming regional council and local authority elections.
“For a local authority to remain without a substantive CEO for a long time, it only means one thing: The political leadership of that local authority has failed the nation,” he said last week.
He said it was “legally incorrect” to head a local authority in an acting capacity for more than six months.
“Either the given local authority has something to hide, so they want to put a person who is in an acting capacity, who becomes vulnerable, and they will be doing whatever they want and not what is administratively correct,” he said.
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