President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah’s recent directive that all government institutions must budget for internships and apprenticeships is a welcome intervention in a country grappling with an escalating graduate unemployment crisis. The instruction is both practical and necessary.
For too long, thousands of young Namibians have walked across graduation stages, degrees in hand and hope in their hearts, only to be met by a labour market that appears structurally incapable of absorbing them.
Internships and apprenticeships are not a silver bullet, but they are a sensible bridge between education and employment. They offer graduates what employers repeatedly demand: experience.
They create pathways into sectors such as energy, mining, technology, engineering, logistics and public administration. Most importantly, they acknowledge a simple truth that policymakers have often ignored: qualifications alone are no longer enough.
Yet while the President’s announcement deserves praise, it also raises an uncomfortable question: why now?
Budgeting cycles across many public institutions are already well underway or concluded. Annual plans have been drafted, approved and costed. Procurement frameworks are being implemented.
Human resource allocations are already spoken for. Asking institutions to suddenly create budget lines for internships after many have completed their planning processes is akin to asking a chef to add ingredients after the meal has already been served.
This is not a criticism of the President’s intention, which is sound. It is, however, a glaring indictment of the planning machinery meant to anticipate national priorities and align institutional readiness accordingly.
That machinery is the National Planning Commission.
The National Planning Commission (NPC), under the leadership of Dr Kaire Mbuende, occupies one of the most strategically important positions in government. In theory, it is the nerve centre of national development, tasked with coordinating long-term plans, monitoring implementation, advising on national priorities and ensuring that ministries, agencies and public enterprises are not operating as isolated islands.
In practice, however, the lived reality on the ground increasingly suggests a troubling disconnect between planning documents and the realities facing ordinary Namibians.
Graduate unemployment is not a surprise phenomenon that suddenly materialised overnight. This has been a visible and growing crisis for years. Every year universities and vocational institutions produce thousands of graduates across disciplines. Every year youth unemployment figures remain staggeringly high. Every year the government and the private sector lament the “skills mismatch”, while graduates sit at home refreshing job portals and submitting CVs into a void.
How then does a country reach a point where an internship intervention of this magnitude is announced at a stage when many institutions have already passed their budgeting windows?
This is precisely where the spotlight must fall on the National Planning Commission.
Planning is not merely the production of glossy documents, strategic frameworks and multi-year visions that gather dust on office shelves. Planning must be predictive. It must be anticipatory. It must identify bottlenecks before they become national emergencies.
A responsive planning institution should have long ago flagged graduate absorption as an urgent economic and social risk requiring coordinated intervention.
Such coordination should not begin with a presidential directive.
It should already be embedded in the planning architecture of government.
The NPC should be convening ministries such as Education, Higher Education, Labour, Industrialisation, Finance and Mines around a single national labour absorption strategy. Universities and vocational institutions should not be operating in parallel to labour market realities. The production of graduates must be linked to economic demand forecasting.
How many engineers will Namibia require over the next decade as green hydrogen projects expand? How many technicians will the oil and gas sector need? What digital skills are required for a modern economy? Which sectors have saturation risks? Which qualifications are producing graduates faster than the economy can absorb?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are precisely the questions a competent planning commission should be continuously modelling, updating and communicating.
Without this, Namibia risks producing graduates for an economy that does not yet exist, while sectors with actual growth potential continue importing skills or complaining of shortages.
This is not simply an economic inefficiency. It is a social risk.
Idle graduates are not just statistics. They represent deferred dreams, frustrated families and mounting social pressure. They represent parents who invested scarce resources into education believing it was a ladder into the middle class. They represent young people who did everything society asked of them, only to find themselves stranded.
A country cannot indefinitely ask its youth to be patient while systems fail to connect education to opportunity.
The consequences are visible: mental health strain, growing disillusionment, brain drain, dependence and, increasingly, political frustration.
The National Planning Commission must therefore become more reflective of the realities on the ground.
That means less abstraction and more measurable implementation.
It means moving beyond theoretical growth assumptions and engaging directly with the actual barriers young Namibians face.
It means understanding that development is not simply GDP growth or foreign direct investment announcements. A country can celebrate billion-dollar energy deals while simultaneously producing a generation of unemployed graduates. If ordinary citizens do not feel development in their own lives, then planning has failed its most fundamental test.
Dr Kaire Mbuende and his team must ensure that planning is not treated as an elite administrative exercise disconnected from lived experience.
Namibia does not suffer from a shortage of plans. It suffers from a shortage of synchronisation.
Too often ministries appear to be solving interconnected problems independently. Education reforms happen in one silo. Labour market concerns in another. Economic development ambitions elsewhere. The result is fragmentation.
The internship directive now provides an opportunity, albeit a delayed one, to begin correcting this fragmentation.
But it cannot end with an announcement.
Government institutions must urgently assess how they can incorporate internship and apprenticeship programmes into supplementary or revised budgets where possible. Public enterprises, in particular, should be at the forefront of implementation.
At the same time, the National Planning Commission must treat this moment as a lesson.
Reactive planning is expensive.
Late coordination creates implementation gaps.
And in a country facing one of the highest youth unemployment rates on the continent, time is a luxury Namibia no longer possesses.
The President has signalled the right direction.
Now the institutions responsible for planning must catch up.
Because a national planning commission worthy of its name should not merely document Namibia’s problems after they emerge. It should help prevent them.
