Erasmus Shalihaxwe
The Namibia Economic Freedom Fighters’ (NEFF) deputy leader, Iipumbu Kalimbo said the party expects the National Assembly to pay them backdated salaries for July and August after they were forced to leave their seats in Parliament.
Kalimbo and NEFF president, Epafras Mukwiilongo were kicked out of parliament in June after the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) deregistered the political party for failing to submit audited financial reports on time.
However, the NEFF challenged their deregistration and won the case in the High Court last week.
Kalimbo told this publication on Monday that the deregistration has caused the party huge financial losses such as their salaries, employees’ salaries, and other accounts the party is paying every month.
They are, therefore, expecting parliament to start paying them again as usual once they are registered again by the ECN.
“Obviously we have to get backdated payments for our salaries, but even the party funding from parliament has been affected. So we expect everything to go back to normal if the ECN is not going to appeal the case and continue wasting public funds.
These ECN guys have caused so much damage to our finances, there were accounts we were paying monthly, but cash follow was cut off suddenly. We have employees doing administration work that is getting salaries from that money, then their salaries stopped suddenly without warning; even parliament didn’t give us a notice that they will stop paying us,” said Kalimbo.
He added that the party lost close to N$1 million on litigation, travelling from the north to Windhoek to attend court proceedings and bringing lawyers from South Africa to fight the case.
Secretary to the National Assembly Lydia Kandetu said they are waiting for ECN to pronounce itself on the matter, and then they will proceed based on that decision.
“We are waiting for ECN to re-register them and we will take it from there, if the decision is made to pay them back then we will definitely pay what is due to them. But at the moment, the party does not exist in our system, but we will reintegrate them based on the ECN decision,” said Kandetu.
ECN spokesperson, De Wet Siluka, said the commission’s position has not changed from that of studying the court judgement and only after will the institution pronounce its position on the matter.
“At this point, our position remains the same that we are still studying the judgement, and only after we are done we will pronounce ourselves,” said Siluka.
