By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14
The board that moves billions is reaching for a statutory tool to decide, in advance, who may compete.
The Central Procurement Board of Namibia is often described by the sums it moves – it has awarded Namibian companies contracts worth around N$7.1 billion (about US$385 million) in a single year – but its authority rests on a quieter thing: the rules it is bound to apply. The construction prequalification is the board reaching for one of those rules.
Created by the Public Procurement Act of 2015, the board acts under a legal duty to pursue transparency, accountability and value for money. Its new prequalification, run under Section 42 of that Act, is best read not as an administrative tweak but as a governance choice about how public money is guarded before it is spent.
A board built to be accountable
The CPBN exists to take high-value procurement out of individual ministries and place it under one accountable body. The Public Procurement Act charges it with conducting bidding on behalf of public entities above set thresholds and with achieving high standards of transparency while obtaining the best value for money. Its remit is scale and scrutiny at the same time.
That mandate makes prequalification a natural instrument. A board answerable for billions has reason to verify who it deals with before a contract is on the table, rather than discovering a contractor’s weakness after the award and a stalled site. Vetting upfront is the governance posture the Act effectively asks the board to adopt.
A body accountable for billions has every reason to check its builders first.
Section 42 as the lever
The reform is anchored in law, not preference. The board points to Section 42 of the Public Procurement Act as the authority for classifying competent, experienced and well-resourced bidders and inviting them to restricted bidding. Grounding the exercise in statute matters, because it makes the resulting shortlist defensible rather than discretionary.
That legal footing is also a check on the board itself. A prequalification run under a named section must follow the criteria the law sets – technical, financial and performance tests applied consistently – which constrains how freely officials can pick favourites. Rules that bind bidders bind the board that wrote them too, and that symmetry is the point.
Anchoring the shortlist in statute disciplines the shortlister as much as the shortlisted.
The leadership carrying it
The institution has been steadied by a governance-minded leadership. Amon Ngavetene, who took the helm of the board in 2022, is a corporate governance specialist focused on risk and compliance, with a law degree and a working background built around exactly the controls that procurement reform demands. The tone set at the top is compliance rather than deal-making.
Public communication has been part of that posture. The board has fronted the prequalification through named officials such as stakeholder-relations manager Johanna Kambala, framing it plainly as a way to ensure only capable, verified bidders take part in specific procurements. Explaining a control openly is itself a modest form of accountability.
A compliance-first leadership treats prequalification as governance, not gatekeeping for its own sake.
The accountability test ahead
The reform will be judged on whether it delivers cleaner outcomes, not just tidier processes. If prequalification screens out under-resourced firms that once won work and failed to finish it, the board can point to fewer stalled projects as proof it worked. If it merely narrows competition without lifting delivery, the governance case for it weakens quickly.
The harder test is openness. A vetted database concentrates power over who competes, so its credibility depends on transparent criteria, a fair route for new entrants and visible reasons when a firm is left off. Accountability is not the absence of gatekeeping but the willingness to show how the gate is worked.
A shortlist earns trust only when the reasons behind it can be seen.
For anyone watching how Namibia governs its public spending, the CPBN prequalification is a governance signal worth reading: a board built for accountability using a statutory tool to decide, in advance, who may compete for state contracts. The decision it puts to policymakers and the board itself is whether to run the register with the transparency its own mandate demands, so that vetting strengthens accountability rather than quietly concentrating it.
Sources: The Namibian; Ngavetene takes the reigns of Central Procurement Board (New Era); Procurement Board awards Namibian companies N$7.1 billion (The Brief)
