Africa-Press – Namibia. THE Minister of Mines and Energy, Tom Alweendo, has stated that more needs to be done to breach the procurement gap between local and foreign companies.
Speaking at the official opening of the Virtual Mining Expo and Conference, Alweendo stated that mining companies are still procuring from foreign companies outside of the country, while local companies can potentially provide such goods and services. The total value of goods and services procured by the mining sector during 2020 stood at N$12.3 billion.
“Even though the figure looks good, there is still a difference between Namibian registered companies that are foreign-owned and Namibian-owned companies. A significant portion of the local procurement amount still goes to foreign-owned Namibian registered companies. This gap needs to be breached,” Alweendo said.
The Virtual Mining Expo and Conference will be presented under the theme ‘The Namibian Mining Industry’s Resilience and Growth Post COVID-19.’ Alweendo noted that to promote local procurement within the sector, the Ministry of Mines and Energy, together with the Chamber of Mines, is developing a database for local inputs.
The database will serve the industry by proving a platform for local suppliers to meet the needs of mining companies, and for mining companies to procure from locals.
Alweendo further noted that despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the mining sector was one of the sectors which came out of the pandemic relatively unscathed.
“The Namibian mining industry accounts for 50% of our export. It is in this regard that I certainly believe that mining must look towards building resilience in its value chains, from suppliers to downstream customers. No one ever thought that one day that either mining activities would have to slow down or that some non-essential operations would have to be put on hold until further notice. The Namibian mining industry employs a workforce of 14 591 directly, making it very vulnerable to the pandemic because if companies failed to safeguard their workforce, this would mean we would have failed the socio-economic development of our country,” Alweendo said.
He further stated that despite the unprecedented situation of Covid-19, the collaboration between stakeholders has resulted in operations continuing under the lockdown period.
