Patience Makwele
The Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) has called on local authorities to move away from measuring activities towards tangible results, warning that council leaders must take responsibility for their performance and be transparent about their commitments to residents.
Executive director and acting accounting officer in the OPM, Petrus Sindimba, said local authorities must shift from activities to results, excuses to accountability and secrecy to transparency.
“Our citizens have the right to know what their Local Authorities have committed themselves to achieving and whether those commitments are being fulfilled,” he said.
Sindimba was speaking on Monday during the official opening of the first Performance Management System (PMS) Workshop for Local Authorities at the Namibia Institute of Public Administration and Management (NIPAM) in Windhoek.
The five-day workshop, running from 2 to 6 November, brings together representatives from Ruacana Town Council and the Okongo, Aroab, Bethanie and Gibeon Village Councils.
It aims to strengthen participants’ capacity to develop and implement performance management systems, including strategic, annual and individual planning processes.
The training also seeks to improve participants’ understanding of how institutional strategic plans, annual plans and individual performance agreements can be aligned with Vision 2030 and the Sixth National Development Plan (NDP6).
Sindimba urged local authorities to align their development priorities with the government’s seven key priority areas, stressing that their implementation should not be left to central government alone.
The priority areas include agriculture, sport, youth empowerment, quality education and training, creative industries, quality health and social welfare, and land, housing and sanitation.
Participants are also receiving practical training in developing performance indicators and targets to strengthen monitoring, accountability and service delivery.
“The successful implementation of the Performance Management System depends not only on the frameworks we develop, but also on the commitment, discipline and determination with which we put them into practice,” Sindimba said.
The workshop is jointly organised by the OPM and NIPAM and sponsored by Prime Minister Dr Tjitunga Elijah Ngurare’s Charity Foundation.
