Page 11 - Professorial Lecture - Prof Nengomasha

Namibia records management programme is guided by the Archives Code, a
local standard for records management modelled on the international records
management standard ISO15489 first edition of 2001. A 2016 second edition
of ISO 15489 recognises the increase in records being made and kept in digital
environments, offering a range of opportunities for new kinds of use and reuse.
Digital environments also allow greater flexibility in the implementation of records
controls, within and between systems that manage records. If the annual reports
are to go by, the public service of Namibia Archives Code and subsequently the
records management programme have not been revised to align with this new
revised standard.

The records management programme was reported to be efficient in the 1900s,
a situation that changed in the late 1990s. This was mostly attributed to the exit
of trained and skilled staff at independence, who were replaced by untrained
and unskilled staff as the public service of Namibia addressed “imbalances
of the past” (Lau, 1994). This is contrary to best practice which require that
this function be carried out by specialists. Studies in the early 2000s on records
management show persistence of poor records keeping in the public service of
Namibia. Barata et al. (2001) observed that there was no active government-
wide records management programme which would normally be coordinated
through the National Archives, and Nengomasha and Amiss (2002), the
Ministry of Basic Education, Sport and Culture (2004) and Nengomasha (2004)
supported this observation. Mazikana (2007) identified Namibia’s public service
as one of those struggling with records and archives management. A more
recent study by Matongo (2021) on managing records for discharge of justice
in Namibia highlighted similar findings, concluding that the current state of
records management practices was likely to impede the discharge of justice
and recommended the following: a records management policy; hiring trained
and qualified records management staff; records management buy-in from all
stakeholders involved in the processes of the justice system. Challenges which
hinder the records management programme include the management of
public service registries by administration officials who lack records management
training and skills thereby hampering the effective management of records. These
challenges are not limited to Namibia basing on Ngoepe and Keakopa’s (2011)
conclusion on South Africa and Botswana that the management of public sector
records was a daunting task, citing inadequate financial resources and failure to
retain skilled staff as some of the challenges the two countries faced. On archives
administration and management, the NAN annual reports highlight acquisition,
appraisal and processing of archival materials, and digitisation. Appraisal is one
of the challenges which the National Archives has highlighted in the past, which
according to the NAN annual reports has since taken off. As regards archives

Transformation of Records & Archives Management in the Public Service of Namibia 11