The Youth Ministry: Namibia’s Undervalued Institution
By: Ndumba J KamwanyahDEVOTION to youth matters is the sole purpose of the Namibian ministry which now goes by the name of the Ministry of Youth, National Service, Sport and Culture.
By virtue of this critical role of serving the nation’s vital resource, hopes and indeed expectations are that the ministry would be a transmission belt (to borrow from the SPYL language) of new and innovative ideas. But in terms of appealing and connecting to the Namibian youth’s core interests and issues of their time, the ministry is failing and failing big. Instead we have an undervalued (if not underperforming) public institution. Its impact, since it was introduced 23 years ago, on the youth and the nation, is probably difficult to gauge.
Young people are critical to any country’s democracy and economic development. And the very existence of this ministry – both under former President Sam Nujoma and the incumbent President Pohamba – to solely focus on the youth, is a clear testimony of good intentions at the highest political level.
The importance of the youth to Namibia’s future is driven home by the recent census report released by the Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) that Namibia is a youthful nation. The policy implication of having a larger youth cohort means that every dollar we have spent (or continue to spend) on the youth ministry is directed (or at least should) at a larger proportion of our nation’s population. It also means that the public investment we make in youth development must or should yield huge returns for the country in terms of economic and social costs and quality of life. The opposite is also true: that the economic, social and political cost of failing to invest properly in the youth would be astronomical in terms of education outcomes, delinquency, productivity and civic participation.
A question, however, must be asked: Is it the ship or the captain[s]? In plain English, is it the leadership or the content of the ministry’s programmes and activities that is failing to deliver? Or perhaps it is both? Of course any assessment of the youth ministry’s performance needs to acknowledge the fiscal reality on the ground. Unfortunately, the youth ministry is one of those ministries which do not get a bigger share from the nation’s cake. For that I sympathise with the ministry. You should too. But money is not everything. Neither should performance depend entirely on the budget allocation.
A snapshot of the youth ministry’s activities throughout its existence suggests a piecemeal approach without clear outcomes (sometimes with a degree of high duplication of services that already being offered by other ministries). On the cultural front, the approach (for the most part) has been in the form of annual cultural festivals held every year. Then add the so-called cultural trips – apparently a form of cultural exchange – abroad to Cuba, China or South Africa. On the sport side, call it the instant gratification syndrome. We love winning but not planning to win. In other words, too much effort is focused on the end rather than the means. But there is no shortcut to winning. As much as we would like to see Brave Warriors (or any other team) kick ass, we need to create the right foundation. And that foundation should begin in the form of a comprehensive sport development programme, when our players and athletes are still very young.
Another curse is the leadership. Some were young while others were not. Yet some were so incompetent that the Namibian public considered them to be ‘deadwood.’ Minister Mutorwa seemed to have focused on building the ministry’s infrastructure, a process that resulted in youth multi-purpose centres throughout the regions. The impact of such centres is minimal. Under Pendukeni Iivula-Ithana, creating agencies seemed to be the order of the day. The result was the birth of the National Youth Council (NYC). But the NYC, which is dominated by Swapo Youth League and Nanso functionaries, is too broad and focuses too much on politics, raising even deeper question and suspicions about its relevance.
There was also the laissez-faire leadership of Minister Richard Kabajani. (Richard who?) Then came the no-nonsense leadership of KK (Kazenambo Kazenambo) who battled it out with the ‘struggle kids’ and his party’s youth wing. What later transpired is public knowledge.
A common thread here, however, is that all the ministry’s past approaches seem to have focused on doing things for the youth, seeing them as clients of the ministry instead of agents of social change. Is Jerry Ekandjo now the man to come up with a turnaround strategy and change course? Would he engage the youth and capitalise on the advent of new technological opportunities (such as Facebook)? Would he think out of the box in order to appeal to the wider youth? Time will tell.
*Ndumba J Kamwanyah is a public policy consultant and an Africa blogger for the Foreign Policy Association. ndumba.kamwanyah@umb.edu; Twitter@ndumbakamwanyah