Page 7 - Professorial Lecture - Prof Nengomasha

It is important to note that e-government involves using information and
communication technology (ICT) to improve the delivery of government
services and information, enhance the efficiency and accountability of the
public administration and strengthen economic performance. In 2016, during
his State of the Nation Address, Namibia’s president Hage Geingob launched
the Harambe Prosperity Plan (HPP), which comprised of short-term ICT goals for
Namibia. The HPP 1 then projected that all Ministries and Public Agencies would
by 2020 promote transparency and accessibility through the e-government
strategy. The Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) and the Ministry of Information
Communication and Technology (MICT), were then tasked as the leading
agencies with the planning, designing and implementation of e-government for
the entire Government of the Republic of Namibia (GRN) during the Harambe
period (OPM, 2016).

The GRN decided on a comprehensive e-Government Strategic Action Plan
(eGSAP) for the public service in Namibia. This strategy included a road map
to make comprehensive use of ICTs to realise what was termed as a customer-
centric governance (OPM, 2014). It was envisaged that this would bring out
high levels of efficiencies and effectiveness within the government and allied
agencies (OPM, 2014). The GRN sought to have a transparent and open
government with seamless access, secure and authentic flow of information
that would provide a fair and unbiased service to its citizen. Nonetheless, it is
essential that as governments embarks on e-government, there is need to pay
special attention to the management of electronic records. This is so because
electronic transactions carried out through e-government applications produce
e-records whose quality and integrity need to be upheld. In the public sector,
the creation of electronic records has become evident with the establishment of
e-services such as the Integrated Tax Administration System (ITAS); Namibia Traffic
Information System (NaTIS); e-procurement, to name but a few. Another notable
transformational agenda was that of the implementation of an electronic
document and records management system (EDRMS), that was implemented
in 2009 by the Office of the President and the OPM. After a year, the system
was rolled out to seven other Offices, Ministries and Agencies (O/M/As) in the
public service. These included: National Archives of Namibia (under the Ministry
of Education, Arts and Culture), Ministry of Veterans Affairs, Ministry of Regional
and Local Government, Housing and Rural Development (now called the
Ministry of Urban and Rural Development), Ministry of Safety and Security, Ministry
of Foreign Affairs now called (Ministry of International Relations), Anti-Corruption
Commission and the National Planning Commission (Nengomasha & Chikomba,
2018). A statistics report of 2019 from OPM obtained during document analysis

Transformation of Records & Archives Management in the Public Service of Namibia 7