The National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW) has turned its attention on the Bank of Namibia, which is being criticised for its “uncontrollably obsession” with inflation.
This was announced last Friday by NUNW’s secretary general, Evaristus Kaaronda, in response to the recent increase in the prime lending rate.
Kaaronda said the reserve bank is “uncontrollably obsessed with treating inflation as if it was the country’s only macro-economic challenge” and “the only national goal”.

Besides this obsession, the outspoken union is also saddened that the reserve bank punishes the working class for the sins committed by a select group of “wayward capitalists”.
“We can understand that our economy has, inherent in its nature, a group of wayward capitalists whose uncontrolled consumption behaviour keeps fuelling inflation. But that all citizens must be punished for such perversion is unacceptable and unfair,” said Kaaronda.
The union fails to understand how the few wealthy individuals are discouraged from spending as they wish through the monetary stance taken by the reserve bank.
NUNW says recent trends recorded in the real estate sector show that the spending ability of the wealthy remains much greater than imagined by the reserve bank.
“Why should the weak be punished for the sins of the selfish wealthy capitalists?” Kaaronda reiterated.
Such continued stance by the reserve bank will only prompt the workers to start demanding higher salary increments “to replenish the eroded real income of the workers”.
Kaaronda mentions the high rate of unemployment, poverty, HIV/AIDS and the gap between the have and have not as some of the serious challenges facing the economy. Yet these cannot be solved by hiking annual interest rates, neither would such a stance help in contributing to the achievements of the Vision 2030 goals, he says.
NUNW advises that government consider re-defining the parameters of the current macro-economic policy. The policy as it stands today poses a “conspicuous absence of a broad economic policy, which could help avert the potential conflicts between macroeconomic policies and labour market policies”.