We Don’t Need More Boots, We Need More Books

In the shadow of rising youth unemployment, broken promises and performative governance, the Namibian Defence Force (NDF) has issued a call – not just for soldiers, but for silence.

The latest recruitment poster, draped in patriotic imagery and rigid criteria, reads less like an invitation and more like a containment strategy. It is not war we are preparing for; it is discontent we are trying to manage.

This is not wartime mobilisation. It is peacetime pacification.

The poster targets a very specific demographic: young, idle and disillusioned. Those aged 18 to 25, not pregnant, not studying, not criminal. In other words, those most likely to question, to organise and to demand accountability. The ones who have watched promises evaporate into press releases. The ones who know that ‘youth empowerment’ often means photo opportunities, not policy change.

And the numbers speak louder than the slogans. As of 2025, Namibia’s youth unemployment rate hovers around 39%, nearly three times the global average. That is not just a statistic – it is a warning. A generation left waiting, watching and wondering whether their country sees them as citizens or as problems to be managed.

This is not recruitment. It is absorption – a ritual of pacification dressed in fatigues.

The Namibian Defence Force offers structure, discipline and identity. But it also risks offering erasure. It asks the youth to trade their frustration for a uniform, their critique for a salute. It does not ask why they are restless; it simply asks them to run drills until they forget.

And what of those excluded – the pregnant, the educated, the differently abled? Are they too unruly to be shaped, or too inconvenient to be absorbed?

Here’s the metaphor: Namibia’s young people are not a threat to be contained, they are a resource to be nurtured. Containment may quiet the surface, but it does not address the heat beneath. If we keep recruiting without listening, we risk turning barracks into spaces of resignation rather than renewal.

This is not a critique of military service, but a lament for what we have made of it – a bandage over a bullet wound. We do not need more boots. We need more books, more studios, more spaces where young people can build without being conscripted.

The question is not whether we are at war. The question is: with whom do we refuse to make peace?

Until we offer the youth more than camouflage, we will continue to mistake containment for care.

And the silence we buy with uniforms will one day be broken by voices we failed to hear.

– Nguvitjita Meeja

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