Switching off PDMS will lead to KeDezemba chaos and beyond

Dalene HeydenrychIn 2002, the Ministry of Finance faced one of the worst payroll crises in our country’s history. The system of payroll deductions collapsed.Thousands of civil servants -teachers, nurses, cleaners, and police officers - received zero take-home pay. Some went into negative balances after all deductions were applied. I can still see the faces of mothers and fathers standing in long queues outside our office, pleading for help, because the payroll system had failed them.That was the year we realised that manual payroll deductions were not just inefficient - they were inhumane. The situation was so dire, government had to intervene and create a single, automated safeguard, the Payroll Deduction Management System (PDMS).It was an innovative move taken by government - far ahead of its time in terms of digital transformation and public service reform. PDMS changed everything. Deductions were now centrally verified and capped to ensure that every employee took home at least 35% of their salary. It ended the chaos, prevented over-indebtedness, and gave employees access to affordable, regulated financial products. In short, it protected people.Fast forward to today, and we are on the brink of undoing all of that hard-won progress.A dangerous experiment, riddled with pitfalls at a very precarious time.According to the Ministry of Finance’s official notice dated 10 October 2025, all aspects of the PDMS will be run “in-house” from 1 December 2025 to 28 February 2026 while consultations continue.The central system protecting over 100 000 government employees will be switched off, and all payroll deductions for loans, insurance, union fees and more will be handled manually by ministry staff, right before Christmas.Everyone in Namibia knows that in December and the run-up to Christmas is when work slows down in all sectors and industries. Government is no different. Annual leave is deservedly taken, KeDezemba is on everyone’s mind. Imagine those few government workers holding down the fort, now needing to come to grips with manually managing hundreds of thousands of payroll transactions during that time. It’s an unrealistic expectation that can and will cause chaos. It will lead to missed payments, insufficient take-home pay, loan defaults, cancelled insurance policies, and people without life cover when they need it most. The systemic financial shock will have far-reaching repercussions, instantly and negatively impacting 100 000 employees.This isn’t fearmongering - it’s a statement of fact; I’ve lived through this exact scenario before. Before PDMS was implemented, lenders had no way of knowing how many deductions an employee already had. Multiple loans could be approved in a single month, leaving the employee’s salary completely depleted by payday. The ministry itself warned in the early 2000s that “lack of control over these deductions often resulted in staff members being over-committed and ultimately receiving zero salaries.” That warning remains just as valid today.Without PDMS, there is no central check to prevent over-commitment. The 35% take-home pay rule, one of the most critical affordability safeguards in Namibia’s public payroll, will become unenforceable in practice. It is not possible to manually track and cross-check deductions across dozens of lenders and thousands of employees every month.The result? Salary errors, debt spirals and deep personal hardship, especially for lower-income workers.A simple, sensible solutionThe ministry has extended the consultation period until 28 February 2026, giving all stakeholders time to re-evaluate the policy. However, consultations mean nothing if employees are left unprotected. The sensible course of action would be to keep the PDMS in place, fully operational and centrally controlled.Government would incur no extra expenses in doing so, and it would preserve employee protection while the reform process runs its course.We can modernise the system. We can improve transparency. But we cannot - must not - dismantle the safeguards that keep families afloat and payroll deductions humming along.As someone who helped build the first version of PDMS to avoid a repeat of the 2002 payroll crisis, I say this with conviction:If PDMS is switched off on 30 November, we will wake up on 1 December to the same chaos we faced 23 years ago. One hundred thousand employees and their families will be affected. Doing this right before Christmas, when families are most vulnerable, when offices are half empty, and when no one will be there to fix the mistakes in time. The fallout will echo for months, if not years. We must not let 2026 be marred by financial chaos for thousands of families.History is warning us loudly. The question is: will we listen?*Dalene Heydenrych is the former acting accountant-general in the Ministry of Finance. She writes in her personal capacity.**

Switching off PDMS will lead to KeDezemba chaos and beyond

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Republikein 2026-01-27

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Switching off PDMS will lead to KeDezemba chaos and beyond

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