The National Council is set to splash at least N$189 000 on the spouses of its members for a five-day training on how to behave, if a leaked internal memo seen by this reporter is anything to go by.
The figure, New Era understands, excludes transportation costs.
Dated 7 August 2023, the missive by acting National Council secretary Efraim Jane is titled ‘Members of Parliament Spouses’ Workshop on Protocol and Etiquette’.
“This memo serves to inform National Council Members of Parliament (MPs) that the institution (NC) is organising a workshop on protocol and etiquette for the spouses of MPs. This workshop is scheduled to take place from 20-25 August 2023 (inclusive of travelling days),” Jane told the MPs.
The workshop venue was to be communicated in due course.
According to insiders, the council will spend at least N$4 500 to cater for the travel and subsistence (S&T) allowances of each spouse.
If each of the 42 parliamentarians has a spouse, this translates into N$189 000 in S&T that taxpayers will fork out for the behaviour training exercise that people at the National Council have described as a “waste of money”.
“For purposes of logistical arrangements, MPs are kindly requested to submit the following documents: spouses’ certified copies of ID and bank confirmation letters to the office of Learning and Development.”
The said documents were due yesterday.
However, the workshop has been received with unease in the NC’s corridors, where members have been at loggerheads over travelling and its related benefits.
“This is total nonsense. It is pure wastage of taxpayers’ money,” said an insider who preferred anonymity out of fear of retribution.
Globetrotting
So far this year, the NC has spent N$3.1 million in travel-related expenditure on inter-parliamentary organisations’ activities.
They include the Pan-African Parliament, SADC Parliamentary Forum, Southern African Development Community Organisation of Public Accounts Committees, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
“As technocrats, we are under pressure from our MPs. They all just want to travel out of the country when the problems they were elected for are here. Maybe former minister [Bernhardt] Esau was right that S&T is lucrative for parliamentarians and ministers.
Even when it comes to benchmarking, they want to go to Asia or Europe, instead of countries like Botswana and others with similar demographics. The money they spent on travelling can easily be used to even change the lives of street kids that we see in Windhoek every day,” a senior administrator at Parliament said recently.