The Namibia Training Authority (NTA) is unable to identify and register eligible employer companies qualified for the vocational education and training VET levy introduced in 2014, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) revealed.
The 2022 UNESCO global review on training funds in Namibia report said NTA estimates that only 15 per cent of eligible levy payers are registered as the entity finds it difficult to establish how many and which companies should be paying levies due to the lack of a unified database of Namibian employers.
The report said the training levy’s main purpose is aimed at mobilising additional resources for skills development and to allocate funds generated to training in priority skills areas.
However, according to the report, only 2 895 employers are registered as levy payers.
It stated that NTA, through the levy, collected N.dollars 380 million between 2018 and 2020, noting that companies with a projected annual payroll of less than N.dollars 1 million are exempted.
The report also indicated that about half of employers consider the levy as a tax, according to an employers’ organisation in Namibia, adding that currently NTA only deploys compliance inspectors as a means to increase compliance.
(NAMPA)
LD/HP/EK
2 (UNITED NATIONS, UNITED STATES, 13 OCT, AFP) – The United Nations General Assembly yesterday overwhelmingly voted to condemn Russia’s annexation of parts of Ukraine after Moscow vetoed a similar effort in the Security Council.
The General Assembly approved the resolution with 143 in favour and five against but 35 nations abstained including China, India, South Africa and Pakistan despite a major US diplomatic effort to seek clearer condemnation of Moscow.
The resolution ‘condemns the organisation by the Russian Federation of so-called referendums within the internationally recognised borders of Ukraine’ and ‘the attempted illegal annexation’ announced last month of four regions by President Vladimir Putin.
It calls on all UN and international agencies not to recognise any changes announced by Russia to borders and demands that Moscow ‘immediately and unconditionally reverse’ its decisions.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, had urged all nations to send a message that the world ‘will not tolerate seizing a neighbour’s land by force’.
AFP
3 (WASHINGTON, 13 OCT, AFP) – President Joe Biden’s administration said yesterday it would prioritise winning over China, seeing it as the only global rival to the United States, even as it also works to constrain a ‘dangerous’ Russia.
‘The post-Cold War era is over, and the competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next,’ Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, said in a speech at Georgetown University to unveil the national security strategy.
The strategy said the 2020s would be a ‘decisive decade for America and the world’ – for reducing conflict, promoting democracy over authoritarianism and confronting the key shared threat of climate change.
‘We will prioritise maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia,’ the strategy said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia ‘poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown’, the strategy added.
China, ‘by contrast, is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective’, it added.
AFP
4 (WASHINGTON, 13 OCT, AFP) – A US jury ordered far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones yesterday to pay nearly US.dollars 1 billion in damages for falsely claiming that the deadly 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was a ‘hoax’.
The jury in Connecticut, after three days of deliberations, awarded $965 million to the families of eight Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent who brought the defamation case against Jones.
Jones, founder of the website InfoWars and host of a popular radio show, has been found liable in multiple defamation lawsuits brought by parents of the victims of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 20 children and six teachers dead.
The 48-year-old Jones claimed for years on his show that the Sandy Hook shooting was ‘staged’ by gun control activists and that the parents were ‘crisis actors,’ but has since acknowledged it was ‘100 per cent real’.
InfoWars declared bankruptcy in April and another company owned by Jones, Free Speech Systems, also recently filed for bankruptcy.
AFP
5 (WELLINGTON, 13 OCT, XINHUA) – Food prices were 8.3 per cent higher in September 2022 compared with September 2021, New Zealand’s statistics department Stats NZ said today.
The annual increase was also 8.3 per cent in August 2022, the highest since July 2009, Stats NZ said.
In September 2022, the annual increase was due to rises across all the broad food categories measured, with grocery food being the largest contributor to this movement, it said.
Source: The Namibian Press Agency
