The Secretary-General of the Public Service Union of Namibia (PSUN), Mathew Haakuria on Thursday said Namibia Wildlife Resorts (NWR) failed to honour a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to not pay its employees overtime.

Haakuria made the claims during a media conference, claiming that NWR has yet to honour its legal obligations regarding overtime pay.

NWR issued an internal staff notice on 24 May 2022 stating that overtime payment would begin on 01 November 2022, however, no overtime money has been paid to any of its employees since then, Haakuria explained.

In response to the claims made, NWR Managing Director (MD) Matthias Ngwangwama told Nampa on the same day that the allegations that NWR has not paid overtime to its employees are false.

“In fact, NWR started paying overtime with effect from 01 November 2022 as communicated to the employees. Overtime for December 2022, and a few backlogs from November 2022, was paid Wednesday with the full remuneration due to all employees,” he said.

Haakuria on the other hand told Nampa on Friday that NWR is not completely false however a lot of its workers have not been paid.

“What NWR is saying is half-true because some people were paid and a lot of them were not. So there is no way they can deny and say that the union is completely false. The whole Namutoni Resort has not been paid,” he said.

The initial complaints, he noted, came from employees of the Namutoni and Okaukeujo resorts.

Meanwhile, in a letter addressed to NWR Chief Human Capital Officer Kingsley Guiseb seen by this agency on Thursday, the employees of Namutoni resort, through their shopsteward said: “So far we have not received the payment for the period of 01 November to 01 December 2022 in short for two months.”

Nampa reached out to NWR’s Corporate Communications Manager Nelson Ashipala, who said what NWR’s MD said to an extent is accurate as 80 per cent of the affected employees have been paid.

“What held back the overtime payment was the verification process. NWR needs to verify whether the actual overtime work has been done. It is a very long process,” Ashipala said.

He gave assurance that the overtime payments will be made in February along with their salaries.

Source: The Namibian Press Agency