The recent reshuffling of executive directors across several Namibian ministries, as announced by the secretary to the cabinet, has once again brought to the surface a structural ambiguity that has lingered within Namibia’s public administration since independence. While ministerial reshuffles are an accepted and indeed necessary feature of democratic governance, the frequent movement of executive directors raises a more profound institutional question: are executive directors political functionaries, or are they senior technocrats entrusted with the long-term administrative and developmental health of the state?
After almost thirty-six years of independence, this question should no longer be unresolved. From both an academic and developmental standpoint, Namibia has reached a level of administrative maturity where the professionalisation, stabilisation, and legal codification of its senior civil service, particularly executive directors, is not merely a matter of preference but of necessity. This is not an abstract position for me. It is informed by lived experience within the Namibian public service at its formative stages.
I entered government service at independence as a personnel officer at the Central Personnel Institute, an institution that was soon replaced by the Public Service Commission (PSC). That transition itself was emblematic of a young state grappling with how to professionalise its administration while shedding colonial bureaucratic legacies. It was an era defined by experimentation, learning, and, inevitably, institutional uncertainty. Later, in the 1990s, I served as Personal Assistant to the Minister of Finance, where I witnessed firsthand the “teething problems” at the intersection between political leadership and administrative authority, particularly between ministers and permanent secretaries, as executive directors were then known.
Those early years were instructive. Budget hearings, in particular, revealed both the potential and the fragility of Namibia’s governance architecture. Ministers arrived with political mandates and developmental ambitions; Permanent Secretaries arrived with technical constraints, fiscal realities, and administrative caution. Where roles were clear and professional respect prevailed, outcomes were coherent. Where boundaries were blurred, tensions surfaced, accountability weakened, and institutional confidence suffered. These experiences continue to shape my conviction that clarity of role is not a bureaucratic obsession but a developmental necessity.
Classical public administration theory has long grappled with this relationship. From Woodrow Wilson’s articulation of the politics–administration dichotomy to Max Weber’s rational-legal bureaucracy, the underlying insight remains relevant: effective states depend on a functional distinction between political authority and administrative competence. While modern scholarship recognises that this separation is never absolute, successful governance systems still rely on senior civil servants who provide continuity, legality, and expertise beyond electoral cycles. In this conceptual framework, the Executive Director occupies a role analogous to that of a Chief Executive Officer in the private sector or a Permanent Secretary in Westminster-derived systems. The Executive Director is the accounting officer, the steward of public resources, and the institutional anchor of a ministry. Treating such a role as politically fluid fundamentally weakens its purpose.
Developmental state literature reinforces this argument. Scholars such as Peter Evans and Ha-Joon Chang demonstrate that sustained socio-economic transformation is anchored in strong, professional bureaucracies characterised by what Evans terms “embedded autonomy”. This refers to an administrative elite that is sufficiently insulated from political interference to act competently and rationally, yet sufficiently embedded in national developmental objectives to remain responsive. Insulation, in this sense, is not anti-democratic; it is protective of the long-term public interest.
Namibia today is no longer a fledgling state testing governance models. It is a middle-income country confronting complex structural challenges: fiscal consolidation, industrialisation, unemployment, inequality, and service delivery pressures. These challenges demand more than political resolve; they demand administrative excellence. Frequent reshuffling of executive directors introduces coordination failures, disrupts institutional learning, and weakens accountability. Over time, responsibility becomes diluted, and performance failures become systemic rather than personal.
From an entrepreneurial perspective, this pattern is immediately recognisable. No serious enterprise routinely rotates its chief executives without regard to sectoral expertise or strategic continuity. To do so would undermine organisational performance. In government, however, the cost is paid by citizens.
It is therefore increasingly untenable for Namibia to rely on convention or discretion in the appointment and movement of executive directors. The time has come to codify, in law, the professional nature of these roles. Such codification should establish clear qualification thresholds, merit-based appointment processes, performance-linked security of tenure, and a legally explicit distinction between political office and administrative leadership. Importantly, it should also define and limit the grounds for removal or reassignment, anchoring such decisions in due process rather than political expediency.
One of the most damaging consequences of administrative instability is the erosion of institutional memory. Having observed government across different eras, I am acutely aware of how often policies are reinvented, lessons forgotten, and long-term programmes disrupted due to leadership churn at the administrative level. Ministries risk becoming policy-rich but execution-poor, procedurally busy but substantively weak.
From a constitutional standpoint, this should concern us all. A professional and stable civil service is not merely an efficiency mechanism; it is a cornerstone of democratic governance. Executive Directors should function as custodians of administrative continuity and constitutional fidelity, ensuring that the state remains capable regardless of political change.
Namibia must therefore consciously cultivate what may be described as “super civil servants”: highly skilled, ethically grounded technocrats whose primary allegiance is to the Constitution and the long-term developmental interests of the Republic. Ministers may and should be reshuffled as political heads. Executive Directors, however, should be institutional anchors.
The recent reshuffling of executive directors should thus serve as a moment of reflection rather than routine acceptance. After nearly thirty-six years of independence, Namibia’s challenge is no longer one of nation-building in symbolism but of state-building in substance. Codifying the technocratic role of executive directors is not an academic indulgence; it is a developmental imperative.
If Namibia is serious about building a capable, accountable, and future-orientated state, then the time has come to move decisively from politically convenient administration to legally grounded professionalism and to finally recognise executive directors for what they ought to be: the enduring executive stewards of the Namibian state.
