Probe blames govt for Agribusdev demise

MATHIAS HAUFIKU WINDHOEKThe agriculture ministry’s decision to appoint its officials to serve on the Agribusdev board is amongst a litany of poor governance practices that led to the fall of the green scheme operator - mainly due to poor management, a forensic report has found.Others include ministerial interference, the board failing to hold management accountable and a lack of board meetings.For years, the agriculture ministry has ignored critics who warned that appointing ministerial officials to the serve on the board is not in line with standard corporate governance rules. In most cases, the Agribusdev board was dominated by officials from the agriculture ministry whom the board should ordinarily report to.A damning Deloitte forensic probe into the business operations of Agribusdev, which Namibian Sun has had sight of, found that few of the board members hailing from the agriculture ministry had relevant experience in operating a commercial enterprise made for profit.“Based on our review of the board’s composition, there is a need to move from the norm of appointing predominantly government employees and consider outside directors who bring an objective, independent view to goal-setting and settling any company disputes. These may also assist in providing commercial experience,” the report recommended.At one point, the deputy executive director in the agriculture ministry, Sophia Kasheeta, served as chairperson of the company’s board. Buttered on both sidesAnother official, Mildred Kambinda served on both the Agro-Marketing and Trade Agency (Amta) and Agribusdev boards. Kambinda is the agricultural production and engineering services head. Her immediate supervisor is Kasheeta. Meanwhile, planning and business development director in the agriculture ministry, Mesag Mulunga, also serves as a member of the Amta board. What this means is that Agribusdev and Amta report to the three officials when they on ministerial duty.The Deloitte report recommended that: “In the next board, the shareholder needs to strike a balance between government representatives and members from the private sector with experience in profit-making enterprises to help make the Agribusdev operations more viable”.The board, it noted, should regularly perform performance appraisals of itself to identify non-performing members and also to determine areas of potential improvement to help them deliver on their mandate.The board was concerned with the poor performance of farm managers and senior management, including the company’s late managing director, Petrus Uugwanga, the report stated.Investigators also found that several staff members had no experience running a company prior to their appointment at Agribusdev. UnderminingThe board “was undermined by Mr Uugwanga who was supposed to report to the them on the operations of the company”.According to the report, Uugwanga would allegedly at times override the board’s decisions and received instructions on Agribusdev affairs from Joseph Ita, the former agriculture ministry executive director.Uugwanga and the board rarely saw eye-to-eye, with the late managing director repeatedly accusing it of wanting to get rid of him. He had also, on several occasions, accused the line ministry of deliberately withholding funds in order to paint the company’s management in a bad light.“There seems to have been no clear reporting lines as decisions were made without the board’s consideration or approval, an example being the decision to include the Rundu Technology Centre under Agribusdev made by the former minister John Mutorwa without the board’s consideration,” the report found.The effectiveness of the board was minimal due to lack of sufficient meetings, which meant management made decisions without board consultation, noted the report.It is understood that the board only met 15 times between 2017 and 2020.It was also found that the effectiveness of the board was also undermined by the interference of officials from the agriculture ministry in governance issues. Another recommendation contained in the report is that a balance should be struck between executive directors, independent non-executive directors and non-executive directors serving on the board.Regular policy reviews, holding management accountable for their actions and frequently appraising management performance against set key performance indicators also formed part of the recommendations.

Probe blames govt for Agribusdev demise

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Namibian Sun 2022-05-29

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Probe blames govt for Agribusdev demise

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Namibian Sun 2022-05-29

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