WINDHOEK – The Ministry of Works and Transport has come under fire from the Namibian Agricultural Union (NAU) for poor maintenance of especially gravel roads countrywide, which the union says has a huge impact on the timely delivery of livestock – and this again impacts severely on the agricultural sector as one of the pillars of the Namibian economy.
NAU president Derek Wright made no bones about the poor maintenance of road infrastructure on Tuesday evening when he addressed the 68th annual congress of the NAU in Windhoek.
While Wright was full of praise for the cooperation and open-door policy of political leaders, he said the NAU experiences problems with the administrative arm of government and accused some permanent secretaries through to the lowest levels of clerks of having few or no centres of excellence.
“The poor maintenance of the road network by the Ministry of Works and Transport has become an area of major concern to all livestock producers as this impacts directly on the productivity of a very important sector of the Namibian economy. I appeal to government that, when doing planning for the improvement of the road infrastructure, to bear in mind the contribution to the well-being of the economy and not to make decisions that just reflect political patronage,” he noted.
Wright urged members of the NAU in a packed Safari Hotel hall to avoid playing the blame game when faced by problems brought about by poor service delivery. “We all experience these problems but we need to come up with solutions, rather than point fingers,” he urged.
“The NAU has over the years presented various offices of permanent secretaries with well-researched documents which were received with much aplomb, but then filed in the proverbial ‘File 13’ and very rarely followed up with concrete action,” he said.
Wright says the NAU has nominated skilled members to serve on the boards of statutory bodies and these individuals have made an excellent contribution to the decision-making process, which has been to the benefit of the good corporate governance of those ministries.
Wright concluded by saying that all economic indicators show that the increase in the world population, together with the concomitant increase in an emerging middle class, would improve the outlook for agriculturalists.
“Predictions are that there will be an increase in the demand for protein in the diets of individuals, leading to an increase in the demand for meat. The demand for food security is going to become even more critical worldwide, and Africa is the continent with, proportionally, more land available for agricultural development than developed economies. This might explain the reason for developed countries moving in to Africa and buying undeveloped rural areas and exploiting intensive farming in these areas,” he said.