Who’s fooling who? The Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) leadership might be fooling their political masters by first delaying and then massaging numbers to make the unemployment rate appear less severe at 37%, rather than 55%.
Similarly, ruling politicians might feel they fooled the voting masses by getting the NSA to delay the release of the disastrous statistics – the numbers, which were expected to come out shortly before last year’s presidential and National Assembly elections, came out this week. But Bob
Marley’s maxim remains hard to beat: “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
By any measure, joblessness numbers should scare all Namibians, especially the rich and the ruling elite who have amassed excessive wealth while the majority of their countrymen and women can scarcely put food on the table.
The NSA changed the definition of employment in 2023, a move criticised for misleadingly reducing the unemployment rate to 37%, a slight increase from the 2018 rate of 33.4%. However, independent statistics experts estimate unemployment has actually ballooned to about 55%.
While the different numbers are statistically significant, for the unemployed and for poorly paid Namibians, who are in the majority, debating the numbers is a luxury.
If anything, the NSA’s game of numbers is only creating a distraction from the swift action needed to drag our country out of the disaster of poverty, and its affiliates: hunger, poor health, despair and the ultimate indignity – feeling worthless.
How can government leaders even entertain the idea that the workforce dropped from 726 000 in 2018 to abbout 550 000 in 2023, even as we watched Namibia’s population swell? There are more mouths to feed and fewer income earners. And we haven’t even factored inflation into this disaster.
Perhaps the scariest statistic? Only one in four youths under 35 are employed. No wonder Namibia has been experiencing a noticeable rise in violent crime and public protests.
The ruling elites and rich Namibians would be well-advised to heed the core message in the theory of Pareto optimality: One cannot be better off without making another worse off.
Inequality cannot continue unaddressed, because riches for a few inevitably come at the expense of the majority. Neither can funds from a small pool of taxpayers be expected to lift the majority out of poverty.
Something in the structure of the economy has to give. And by the way, it’s not about the racial distribution of resources that has been used by the ruling elites to fatten themselves.
The self-enrichment practice of dishing out resources, such as fishing and mineral licences, for free, needs to stop.
Solving challenges requires government leaders and policymakers prepared to collect and acknowledge accurate figures on the severity of the problems – not bootlicking NSA officials.
A competent NSA leadership ought to demand the resources to deliver accurate, frequently consistent and timely statistics to spot problems before they develop into the monumental disaster that unemployment has become.
Quo vadis, Namibia?
How Can Namibians/Africans Like Trump?
SOME AFRICANS HAVE expressed admiration for United States (US) president Donald Trump’s outrageous behaviour.
They even support his demeaning references to immigrants when telling them to ‘go back’ to their countries of origin, going as far as targeting former president Barack Obama.
Apparently, we forget that Trump’s mother was from the United Kingdom, his grandparents were from Germany, and his wives are from eastern Europe.
We perhaps also forget that Trump has often targeted the likes of Obama, whose mother is a white American, and other people of non-Caucasian pigmentation.
The likes of Trump, Elon Musk and billionaire friend Peter Thiel have benefited from migration and the violent dispossession of the indigenous in the US, Namibia and South Africa.
It’s apparently easy to be fooled by race supremacists and hypocrites whose model for “success” is nothing short of mercenary white supremacism.
Our brains must truly be out of storage for any of us to reach the point of admiring neo-Nazis.
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