Africa-Press – Namibia. Trade minister Lucia Iipumbu yesterday said her ministry has noted with great concern the recent developments in the business sector.
This, she stated, involves an increasing trend of aggression towards some sections of the business sector, especially foreign owned entities, which the Ministry of Industrialisation and Trade (MIT) stated has demonstrated itself worryingly.
“Recognising that the business environment is troubled with increasing challenges both pre- and post- the Covid-19 era, intra-conflicts will only serve to worsen an already impaired environment. In addition, such intra-hostilities will ultimately erode overall business competitiveness, which will disable our country’s ability to trade effectively and efficiently within and across the borders,” read a statement from Iipumbu.
“The MIT herewith denounces such increasing misunderstandings and humbly urges for the immediate dejection of such behaviour by all Namibians. In the same vein, the MIT would appreciate the usage of this platform to contextualise the matter of enterprise development within the context of increasing hostilities.”
She noted that challenges of enterprise development are universal across the business sector and should therefore not be labelled simply as local versus foreign-owned entities turf wars.
In the issued statement, the trade minister noted that collaborative partnerships between MIT and the private sector as early as 2006 had evolved continuously to frame the issues better as well as the requisite solutions.
By 2010, these alliances yielded the first business sector reservations for local Namibians, which later on still needed policy and legislative perfection in the case of the Namibia Competition Commission and Masmart/Walmart in 2011.
These collaborative partnerships eventually evolved into a Ministerial Committee, launched in August 2020, consisting of the ministries of trade, finance (including Namra), labour, urban and regional development, home affairs, as well as the Social Security Commission and the Police Force.
Said Iipumbu: “Consequently, these partnerships, especially emanating from the Ministerial Committee, are ensuring policy, legislative, and monitoring and evaluation perfections through working on the draft regulations to accompany the Namibia Investment Promotion and Facilitation Bill (NIPFB), covering key aspects such as business sector reservations whilst introducing business inspectors with full responsibility to ensure business compliance and investigate cross-sectoral policy matters. Business inspectors will not be new positions created but rather the MIT’s regional staff members who have been involved in business evaluation work all along”.
She continued that to this end, the challenges that infiltrate the cohesive development of the informal economy, startups and general entrepreneurship have been and are being framed in a much better fashion.
Furthermore, Iipumbu pointed out that the development of a national policy on informal economy, startups and entrepreneurship as well as its attendant act is a policy target in the Harambee Prosperity Plan II, and it is slated to be finalised by the MIT in 2023.
This Policy and Act is expected to further enhance and concretise the ideals of the NIPFB as well as associated policy work, such as the Namibia Equitable Empowerment Framework.
Iipumbu concluded: “The approach, as attributed above and built on foundations of formal collaborative relationships, provides ample avenues for the identification of sustainable solutions across a multitude of stakeholders whilst not lending themselves to increasing business sector hostilities, which harm our competitiveness and investment attractiveness. The MIT will therefore implore the Namibian nation to rather lend credence to such an approach as opposed to engaging ourselves in unformalised and at times haphazard and stakeholder deficient approaches that may lead us all into a strait jacket of hardening feelings and heightened hostilities”.
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