By Mbatjiua Ngavirue
WINDHOEK Minister of Labour Alpheus !Naruseb is believed to be trying to mediate in the highly controversial retrenchment process currently taking place at the National Housing Enterprise. !Naruseb appears to be acting mainly as facilitator, bringing the Namibia Financial Institutions Union (Nafinu) and NHE management together. The minister has apparently also requested the disputing parties to turn the volume down so the matter can be resolved in a cooler atmosphere behind closed doors. Additionally, at least one senior minister is believed to have indicated on the sidelines at the opening of Parliament that not only may NHE Chief Executive Vincent Hailulu’s head be about to roll, but also those of the entire board of directors. The “retrenchments” at the NHE have been marked by a callousness and almost cold-blooded ruthlessness that makes former employees question the real motive behind the dismissals. Many workers affected by these job losses say there seems to be a clear trend developing among chief executives at parastatals to contrive bogus retrenchment exercises. The main aim of the sham retrenchment programmes, they say, is for management to replace existing employees with their own cronies or newly-graduated offspring of influential people. Such fake retrenchment programmes have already taken place – with disastrous consequences – at TransNamib where the company unfairly dismissed existing managers for no apparent reasons. TransNamib was then ostensibly supposed to replace them with more qualified people, only for the new appointees to turn out to be generally incompetent, with at least one even investigated for corruption.
A similar exercise is reportedly now taking place at Agribank, where the bank recently told all 142 employees at the institution that they must re-apply for their positions. The “clean-up operation” at Agribank is seemingly the result of a reported N$100-million loss the bank made in the last financial year. According to a report in a local Afrikaans daily, Agribank management told employees at a staff meeting on Monday that they blamed the “old guard” for the precarious financial position of the bank. It is difficult to see how management came to this conclusion, since normally management directs the policy of an organization and not the staff. Agribank management seems to have forgotten the old adage – “only a poor workman blames his tools.” The one redeeming quality about the proposed Agribank retrenchments is that at least the company has indicated it will first negotiate retrenchment packages before terminating the employment of anyone. The opposite happened at NHE, where employees were curtly informed by letter on August 31, 2006 that they should not return to work on September 1, 2006. The Namibian Labour Act clearly stipulates that retrenchments can only legally be carried out under two particular sets of circumstances. One is where a company has incurred severe financial losses, over a protracted period that it can no longer sustain. The other situation that allows a company to retrench employees is when it is restructuring the business in order to enter into a completely new area of business. In this case, the company may feel that its present employees are not qualified for the new jobs, or some positions simply become redundant. In both cases, however, the Labour Act does not allow a company to re-advertise, for a period of two years, the same positions from which it has retrenched employees. If for some reason, the company has to refill a position it previously made redundant, the Act states that it must give preference to retrenched staff. Retrenched NHE employees say that, to circumvent the Labour Act, Vincent Hailulu at NHE has come up with a highly creative but questionable approach to the problem. Hailulu has allegedly advertised new posts at the NHE, but without including any job descriptions, or with very vague job descriptions. Ex-NHE employees question how the company is even going to grade jobs with such sketchy job descriptions. They allege that Hailulu is essentially just playing around with terminology. The company has reduced the four previous General Manager positions to three Senior Manager positions, by combining Finance and Human Resources into one position. The latest 2004/2005 financial figures available before Hailulu decided to launch his retrenchment programme showed that NHE made a profit of N$21à 663, based on total assets of N$649à809. The dismissed employees say the retrenchment exercise is fundamentally bogus. The company is hardly on its way to the poorhouse, and neither is it intending to change its core business. They are, furthermore, convinced that the new employees recruited by Hailulu will be carrying out the same basic functions as the dismissed employees, albeit with different titles. Sham retrenchment exercises are, of course, nothing new in Namibia. Several have taken place at the NBC and at Telecom Namibia, but in those cases the main motive appeared to have been for self-enrichment. People at management level became notorious for giving themselves exceptionally generous retrenchment packages and, as in the case of the NBC, then resurfacing in the same position after having cashed in. Lower level Telecom Namibia employees were often heard to complain about how management would give themselves rich retrenchment packages, whereas they could never get one. Sham retrenchment exercises that send people almost destitute into the street, however, seem to be a new and worrying trend in the country.