Klaus Dierks

Karl Otto Ludwig Klaus Dierks, born in Berlin-Dahlem on 19 February 1936 and died on 17 March 2005, was a German-born Namibian civil engineer, transport planner and historian. He studied civil engineering and history at Technische Universitaet Berlin, then worked as an engineer in South Africa before moving to South West Africa, where he spent more than thirty years as a roads engineer in the Namibian Department of Transport. He later founded the consulting engineering firm Namibia Consult Incorporated, which worked on appropriate technologies for local development. After independence in 1990 he served as Deputy Minister of Works, Transport and Communication and then of Mines and Energy, and he later chaired the Electricity Control Board and TransNamib, the national railway company, which he turned from a loss into a profit. He wrote nearly forty publications on Namibian transport infrastructure and history.