Today the Directorate of Forestry is in its fourth year in the implementation of its national programme and the top management of the directorate is aware that the realization of our objectives is underway and will only be achieved through forward planning. The national forestry strategy was motivated by the need to elevate the profile of the sector, the necessity to source funds from Namibia and abroad by presenting a comprehensive nationally adopted programme and to give young professionals in the service some strategic direction. So far, all these are being realized to various degrees.
All management staff have been made aware of and a number were involved in the review of the sectors mission, the drawing up of values and the major mid-term strategic objectives on which we base our annual operational plans. This is in itself a major achievement in building the discipline of strategic thinking. This was again motivated by the desire to get more political legitimacy and to get the service to cultivate a new culture in a government service department; to achieve results rather than to merely draw a salary. The sustainability of these will depend entirely on the ability of management cadres of the Directorate of Forestry to maintain the system and fully internalize it as a management culture for the directorate.
Since we are now operating on result areas and indicators for the sector, our officers are slowly adopting the achievement of results as a measure of their performance and not a series of uncoordinated activities as indicative of their utility in the forest service.
To put the sector’s performance in the national sustainable development context we have on account of the NFP, adopted a global policy in the name of Criteria and Indicators of sustainable forest management. This is not only good for the sector and the nation, but also our contribution to the regional and global good. This was encouraged in SADC forestry meetings and also at international forums such as the meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) and the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) and the realization by the management of the forest service in Namibia that the sector would gain by a more accurate and thorough assessment of the sector using the C and I process than without it. This is because the forest sector in Namibia has suffered historically by governments that have under-estimated its contributions to National Development. International or global policies are therefore a good opportunity for national services that can use them creatively for the benefit of their national services.
Through the NFP Namibia has put together an impressive capacity building programme that will produce quality staff for the forest sector, which is expected to keep the profession in the national limelight and keep it out of the oblivion it was subjected to, for over 70 years before independence. The reason behind this was that soon after independence the sector has been managed largely by expatriate staff and yet the political powers of the country wanted the forest sector to play a major role in development and help green and ameliorate its harsh climate. The political expectations and the presence of expatriate staff provided a good motivation for the government and donors to allocate funds for formal education in forestry. Within the next four years, all available middle-level management positions will, be occupied by Namibians and it is likely that the same will be true of the top positions in management. It is likely that the availability of qualified staff will create a competency-based work culture in the directorate.
The NFP process did much to elevate the profile of the forest sector and brought together other institutions, which now understand the sector better. This was the result of the cross-sector strategic planning task force, the series of national level workshops opened at the ministerial level, the support given by the National Planning Commission and in getting the President if the Country to write the preface of the National Forestry Strategic Plan.
With the current structure in place to implement the forestry programmes, with a new and progressive forest bill soon to be in place by 2001 and qualified and ambitious Namibians, it is likely that promoting the sector by implementing programmes is what will buy legitimacy of the otherwise past neglected and underrated sector.
As a result of the NFP the forest sector has been running a national forest inventory, to the extent that, we now can boast an information base for the sector. Furthermore, the inventory team is likely to form the nucleus of a new Management Planning Unit and the inventory results have also spurred the development a Management Information System with six components namely, Fire monitoring, forest resource monitoring, management reporting, forest permits, resource inventory systems. The second-phase of the Namibia-Finland Forestry Programme will further develop and consolidate the MIS and Management Planning Unit. The sustainability of these achievements is dependent upon the practicality, simplicity and costs of such new developments since it facilitates their absorption into forestry routine or operational programmes. The Inventory data is already being used by the forest service and Namibians can now plan and conduct reconnaissance and management planning inventories. In addition, the Directorate has recruited an officer with mathematics background and is being trained in data analysis and interpretation.
So far the permit system has been adopted by the forest service and is run by Namibian Staff and it is based on a locally developed software programmes and be used by officers without much computer training. The National Remote Sensing Centre has been trained in fire scar mapping from NOAA satellite images. The other systems will soon be launched. These suggest that programmes can be absorbed and have the potential to become absorbed and sustained with minimum external inputs; hence ensuring sustainability.
Another achievement is the centre role that the forest sector is playing in both the National Biodiversity and Desertifcation Task Forces. This took time to develop but its being realized by virtue of our slow but systematic implementation of our environmental forestry programme and also because of us maintaining the most sophisticated remote sensing centre laboratory in the country. It has been realized that we can play a major role not only in mapping but resource and environmental monitoring in general. The sustainability of this programme depends on the capacity inside the directorate of forestry to understand and adopt these in annual programmes, the costs of implementing the components, the activeness of the National Biodiversity Taskforce and the persistence of biodiversity conservation on the global agenda. So far, the capacity within the directorate is improving. The costs of biodiversity conservation can be absorbed by current levels of recurrent expenditure, which require from time to time, to be augmented by the occasional development budget. In addition, national interest in biological diversity is not only in government but also outside in environmental NGO’s and international conservation bodies such as WWF, IUCN and regional bodies such as SADC. These factors tend to favour the sustainability of the biodiversity programmes.
The national forest programme has also demonstrated our potential to manage and otherwise control forest and wildfires and also to demonstrate the use of prescribed fires as used in range management.
Because we have a nationally adopted document, it is now a lot easier for the forest service to direct donor funding. It is a well-known thing that donor co-ordination is one of the most difficult things to achieve by a developing country.
