With its stable, multi-party parliamentary democracy and an economy buoyed by strong agricultural, tourism and mining sectors, Namibia has a lot going for it as a nation. This fact was reaffirmed this year when Bloomberg named Namibia the top emerging market economy in Africa and the 13th best in the world.
Despite the remote nature of much of the country, Namibia boasts seaports, airports, narrow-gauge railways and highways, and is actively seeking to become recognised as a regional transportation hub. One of the major players responsible for making this vision a reality is the Roads Authority of Namibia.
The core business of the Authority is to construct and maintain the country’s road sector, while also playing a pivotal role in improving and maintaining road safety in Namibia along a network that has been ranked among the safest, most efficient and sustainable in the developing world. In order to achieve its aims the Roads Authority has adopted several distinct strategic goals. These include delivering safe, sustainable and efficient management of the national road network, improving organisation process, making itself a strategic partner and ensuring its own financial sustainability.
Fully owned by the Namibian government under the Ministry of Works and Transport, the Roads Authority was formed alongside two sister organisations, Road Fund Administrators and Roads Contractor Company. Together these three organisations where tasked with spearheading what was then known at the Ministry of Works, Transport and Communications Project.
Said project was established with a view to commercialise the functions of the then Department of Transport in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the management of road construction and road maintenance in Namibia. To this day the Roads Authority continues to carry out the tasks it was originally mandated to, to the best of its ability.
The Authority’s vision of maintaining a sustainable road sector that meets, and even exceeds, national and regional socio-economic needs runs parallel to Vision 2030, a document issued in 2004 that clearly spells out Namibia’s development programmes and strategies to achieve its national objectives. In helping to pursue Vision 2030, the Authority accepts that it has to go beyond its statutory objective of managing a safe and efficient network. The result has seen the Authority pursue additional improvements to road infrastructure and road user support systems.
In its quest to make itself among the very best companies to work for in Namibia, the need to establish a value driven workforce has been identified as one of the Authority’s strategic priorities. Today the Authority has a well-articulated Corporate Charter outlining its Vision, Mission, Values and Brand promise. This, it feels, helps provide a sound base for collective action and synergy toward excellence and optimal performance amongst its workforce.
A further recent development within the organisation has seen the rollout of its “Values our Pride” initiative, which represents a strategic approach aimed to encourage all members of management and supervisors to lead by example and guide staff to live and enact the corporate values in their day-to-day working life.
This initiative will be a biannual event during which employees celebrate, reflect and take pride in the Authority’s values. The objectives of this initiative are to establish coherence and congruence between personal values and the core values espoused by the Authority’s Corporate Charter, for management to “walk the talk” by enacting the values through their conduct, to build synergy and creative co-operation among employees and to raise the level of organizational trust and performance throughout the business.
More recently the Roads Authority was successful in completing a new six-point corporate strategy, a part of which has seen it commence with an organisation-wide rebranding exercise. In the time since it has also embarked on creating a new six-point growth strategy. As part of this growth strategy, the Roads Authority has taken it upon itself to become more responsive to public demands and has begun investing in the revitalization and extension of the country’s road infrastructure.
The growth of said infrastructure and the on-going expansion of the country’s road network has unquestionably contributed immensely to the economic development of Namibia and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) sub-region as a whole. Going forward, the road construction projects that the Roads Authority will oversee will be geared towards expanding the road network to the more neglected and marginalised communities as part of the government’s long-term goal of bringing the linked economic benefits to as much of Namibia’s population as possible.
Written by Will Daynes, research by Robert Hodgson
NamibiaRoads-Africa-T&L-Nov13-Bro-s.pdf
