Wearing two hats at the office

Michelline Nawatises





Elizabeth Nakatana was born forty-plus years ago in Windhoek, being the youngest of a family of three siblings. She grew up in the dusty streets of Donkerhoek’s Ovambo Location in Katutura. She attended Mandume Primary School and senior primary school at Namutoni and finally secondary school at Immanuel Shifidi High School. To keep herself busy after school, she enrolled for a Certificate in Commerce course at Unam and afterwards, she joined TransNamib Holdings Limited in 1998.

It was in the same year that she decided to pursue her studies further and enrolled for a National Diploma in Commerce at the Polytechnic of Namibia, now the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST). She completed a Bachelor of Commerce in Law degree in 2020.

Nakatana wears two hats in her office, as an industrial health and safety officer and as the principal officer of the TransNamib Retirement Fund. As a health and safety officer, she is responsible for identifying, implementing, monitoring and enforcing the application of health, safety, environment, loss control and logistical systems and procedures in the company, to ensure a healthy and safe working environment.

One of her main duties is to ensure that the company complies with occupational health and safety guidelines as set out in the Labour Act 2007.

“As the principal officer of the Retirement Fund, I have specific statutory and compliance responsibilities and is accountable to the Board of Trustees. In a nutshell, I am mostly responsible for the administrative functions of the fund,” she says.

She says the biggest challenge as a safety officer is to promote a safety culture, especially when there is resistance to change.

“Overcoming this mentality of workers is my biggest daily challenge, another challenge is the lack of resources to execute the functions properly and, with the ugly bug called Covid-19, the situation simply became difficult to handle at times,” she says.

“With continued employee safety education, I must say, there have been accomplishments. The injury frequency rate has been reduced from 40 lost-time injuries annually to just less than 10 lost-time injuries, but the main goal is to have zero injury rate.”

A typical day consists of a briefing meeting with the health and safety manager, checking e-mail from the control clerk detailing the irregularities reported in the past 24 hours, updating the accident/incident reporting tool, dealing with complaints from employees, conducting routine safety inspections, compiling reports and putting together health and safety programmes.

Nakatana has found herself on a career path that she did not study for. While she was studying towards a National Diploma in Commerce, she found herself in the health, safety and loss control section as a secretary to the manager.

While she was compiling the section’s monthly reports, she started developing a keen interest in what the safety officers were doing. “I would, for example, read their monthly reports, so I told myself that if this is all that they do, then I can surely do it too,” she says.

It so happens that one of the safety officers resigned, and she approached her manager to allow her to act in the vacant position as she felt that she was not using her full potential being a secretary.

Nakatana would like to venture into the pension fund industry, having adequate experience on how the industry operates. “As a principal officer of our pension fund, I have developed some interest and would like to explore this unique industry,” she says.