It’s Time to Engage With the Informal

MUCH OF THE TALK about creating formal jobs and formal housing rests on ambitious claims that we can create hundreds of thousands of jobs and build tens of thousands of houses.

But it’s clear that these aspirations are hindered by stifling policies, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and misplaced priorities.

It is time to pursue another solution to bring real benefits to Namibians, which is to engage the enormous energy that drives the nation’s informal sector.

Yes, create jobs, but do much, much more to stimulate and grow the informal incomes on which most Namibians already depend.

Together with their dependants, these are the Namibians who are the unemployed, or informally and vulnerably employed that make up more than two thirds of Namibia’s labour force.

Boost their earning power, and ease regulations that suppress entrepreneurship, informal markets and the development of small businesses and cheap transport services.

Inject more public funds in social grants into the informal sector, much of which will spread and multiply through the informal sector.

And a sizeable amount will come back as taxes into the public purse managed by the government.

PLOTTING THE FUTURE

Years ago our primary concern when leaving school or university was to get a job. Nowadays, the urgent need is to make an income.

Given the surge of people flocking to towns, the predominant form of housing in Namibia will soon be a tin hut.

More people will live in tin shacks in dense informal settlements than all the traditional rural or brick urban houses and apartments put together.

Having so many people in tin shacks is one big challenge.

A greater problem is that most are packed into dense informal settlements where services are either absent or only available here and there for residents to share.

No one has secure tenure and so building a permanent structure is unwise. Surveying and formalising plots with secure tenure is also hard in the midst of such disarray.

Building streets and providing piped water, power, refuse removal and sewerage to each home is even harder.

And the reason for this mess is our refusal to begin urban development by providing small plots with secure tenure on which residents can start not a tin shack, but a solid, brick home.

Rather, we insist that all urban housing be on larger, fully serviced plots that only a few can afford.

USING OUR STRENGTHS

Housing developers make millions, but the inhumane mess grows and grows, because we focus on the provision of costly formal housing rather than on the provision of land on which people can build a secure future.

Marking out tens of thousands of plots is comparatively easy and cheap.

The plots can even be given away, and their layout planned so that roads, water, sewerage and power can be provided later rather than never!

Indeed, some forward-thinking local authorities have done just that to create orderly, secure foundations for people to start their own homes.

The plots will provide people with a secure foundation where one brick room can follow another, and another.

This is the way homes develop everywhere. And that is the way urban development can progress in an orderly fashion to benefit hundreds of thousands of Namibians.

Namibia should always aim high, but also use its strengths to pursue logic, rather than rely on populist fantasies.

IT’S TIME TO BE BOLD

Among our strengths are the great number of young energetic, thinking and innovative Namibians, most of them surging to town to build a decent life.

Their energy will power Namibia’s future.

Much youthful life revolves around hustle, a philosophy that many of us elderly, stodgy types would do well to understand, indeed embrace.

Namibia will gain more by facilitating than curtailing the informal.

It is also time to be bold and get our policies, attitudes and fundamentals aligned to what most Namibians need.

• John Mendelsohn is a geographer passionate about birds, rivers, education, rural economies, land rights and uses, mostly in Angola and Namibia.

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