Windhoek
National Housing Enterprise (NHE) Chief Executive Officer Vinson Hailulu will not seek renewal of his contract when it expires in August, ending a 10-year tenure at the helm of the government-owned housing entity.
Hailulu informed Urban and Rural Development Minister Sophia Shaningwa about his non-availability for re-appointment during a meeting between the two last month. The NHE board of directors has also been informed of Hailulu’s non-availability, documents seen by New Era reveal.
“It is my belief that I have made my humble contribution to the growth and development of the NHE and thus the time has come for me to pursue other professional and business interests,” Hailulu said in a letter authored on Tuesday this week. He became CEO of NHE on September 1, 2005, replacing Mike Kavekotora – the current secretary general of the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP).
A holder of a Masters Degree in Public Management from Harvard University in the US, Hailulu was the first black CEO of the City of Windhoek. Before that, he was CEO of the Oshakati Municipality.
He leaves NHE at the height of the implementation of government’s Mass Housing Development Programme, for which the parastatal is the executing agency. Figures contained in a submission of NHE’s mass housing update to government in February indicated that the total number of houses constructed at the time stood at 1 214, although there were 3 345 houses still under construction by December 2014, out of the total 10 043 houses planned to be constructed in the first phase of the Mass Housing Programme. Issues around mass housing – such as payment of contractors – have generated negative publicity against NHE, but the company has regularly argued that funding problems were mostly the creation of government’s snail-paced bureaucracy.
Also, as companies jostled for mass housing tenders last year and the year before, some companies approached the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) with allegations that Hailulu acquired his luxury N$1.5 million GL500 Mercedes Benz through dubious means. They claimed that some successful tenderers for the mass housing tenders might have financed the vehicle’s purchase in return for such tenders.
The ACC tasked its most senior investigator – Nelius Becker – to roll out a probe, which included approaching M+Z Motors, the dealership from which Hailulu bought the top-end vehicle. The anti-graft body later wrote to Hailulu, confirming it did not find anything dubious in the manner he acquired his vehicle. Listing some of his successes, Hailulu this week said he led an organisational transformation process at the NHE. He also stated that he authored the current national housing policy for government in 2009 and recently designed and implemented the on-going mass housing programme.
“It gives me real pleasure to take this opportunity to most sincerely thank the board of directors of NHE, our line minister and indeed the Namibian government at large for having given me the opportunity to serve this institution in the capacity of a CEO,” he said. Speaking to a local magazine, Executive Namibia, which rated him among the 25 top performing business executives since independence, Hailulu said when he took over in 2005, NHE was spending about N$16 million on housing production annually.
“…Today we invest close to N$700 million annually in capital development projects,” he told the magazine.
He said NHE constructs an average of 600 houses annually at the moment.