Last week, after laying my mother to rest, a retired Executive Director, what we used to call a Permanent Secretary, came to pay his respects. After the cultural formalities, we sat and spoke, as Namibians often do, about life. I asked him a simple question: what are you doing with yourself after retirement? He shrugged, almost apologetically. “I’m just busy with a few things, here and there,” he said. There was no bitterness in his voice, only resignation.
That moment stayed with me long after he left. Not because of the words themselves, but because of what they symbolised. Here was a man who had spent decades at the heart of the Namibian state, shaping policy, managing institutions, and carrying the institutional memory of a young republic, and now, at 60 plus, he was functionally surplus to requirements.
As an entrepreneur, I deal daily with scarcity: scarce capital, scarce skills, scarce time. From that vantage point, what Namibia is doing with its experienced technocrats is not just unfortunate; it is irrational.
Namibia is a young country with an even younger institutional memory. We cannot afford to treat experience as disposable. Yet we do exactly that. We retire well-qualified, highly skilled citizens into the streets the moment they reach a prescribed age, regardless of their relevance, capacity, or willingness to continue contributing. In doing so, we send a troubling signal: that knowledge has an expiry date.
In mature economies, retirement is often a transition, not a termination. Former senior officials move into advisory roles, think tanks, mentorship programmes, academia, boards, or structured consultative positions within the state. Their value is not in occupying executive power but in transferring knowledge, institutional memory and judgement – things that cannot be fast-tracked or downloaded.
In Namibia, by contrast, retirement often marks a sudden severance. Office doors close. Access ends. Phone calls stop. What remains is silence and the quiet erosion of accumulated wisdom.
This is not merely an administrative oversight; it reflects a deeper political culture. Ours increasingly resembles a “winner-takes-all” system. If you were aligned, rightly or wrongly, with Candidate A, and Candidate B prevails, your professional life effectively ends. Competence becomes secondary to perceived loyalty. Experience becomes suspicious. Institutional memory becomes inconvenient.
The tragedy is that this zero-sum logic does not punish individuals alone; it impoverishes the state itself.
Public administration, like any complex system, relies on continuity. Policies are not implemented in electoral cycles; they unfold over decades. When experienced technocrats are removed wholesale, the state loses not only technical capacity but also historical context: why certain decisions were made, which reforms failed and why, which compromises were necessary, and which red lines must never again be crossed.
As an entrepreneur, I know that no serious business would fire its most experienced managers simply because they turned 60, especially if they were still productive and mentally sharp. Instead, their roles would evolve. They would mentor younger staff, advise leadership, sit on investment committees, or manage risk. Knowledge would be preserved because knowledge is an asset.
Why, then, does the Namibian state, arguably the country’s largest and most complex enterprise, do the opposite?
One answer lies in our underdeveloped approach to knowledge preservation and knowledge development. We have invested heavily in educating Namibians, often at great public expense. Many of our senior technocrats were trained locally and abroad, exposed to international best practice, and hardened by decades of real-world governance challenges. To allow that investment to evaporate at retirement is economically wasteful.
Another answer lies in insecurity. Experience can be threatening in politicised systems. Institutional memory challenges revisionism. Competence exposes mediocrity. It is easier to start afresh with loyal novices than to manage confident professionals who remember how things used to work and how they could work better.
Yet this approach is self-defeating. Today’s incumbents should take careful note: the system you benefit from now will one day turn against you. The comfort of the office, the influence, the relevance – all of it is temporary. If we do not reform how we treat retirees, today’s ministers, permanent secretaries and executives will tomorrow be the very people shrugging their shoulders, condemned by a system they helped to feed.
Namibia urgently needs a structured, non-partisan framework for post-retirement engagement. This could include a national register of retired senior professionals, advisory councils attached to ministries, formal mentorship programmes within the public service, and partnerships between retired technocrats, universities and the private sector. Participation should be voluntary, performance-based and clearly defined, but it should exist.
Crucially, this framework must be insulated from party politics. Knowledge does not belong to factions. Institutional memory is not an opposition asset. It is national property.
If we continue on our current path, we will remain dependent on external consultants, foreign advisors and academic institutions abroad to supply insights that already exist within our own borders. We will keep importing expertise while exporting relevance.
The brief conversation with that retired executive director revealed something uncomfortable but necessary: Namibia is not yet serious about valuing experience. Until we are, we will struggle to build durable institutions, coherent policy and sustainable development. A young nation cannot afford to retire its wisdom.
