The month of May in Namibia is usually a season of pride and flowing graduation gowns.
At the Namibia University of Science and Technology (Nust), 2,962 graduates walked the stage, with a significant 1,087 emerging from STEM disciplines.
Not to be outdone, the University of Namibia (Unam) hosted ceremonies for a staggering 4,342 graduands across eight ceremonies.
On paper, Namibia is becoming a knowledge powerhouse but in reality, these graduates are stepping off the podium and directly into a statistical abyss.
The latest data from the Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) 2023 labour force report paints a picture that no amount of celebratory champagne can mask and while our lecture halls are full, our factories and offices are not.
The national unemployment rate has climbed to 36.9 percent. More devastating is the youth unemployment rate, which sits at 44.4 percent.
What we are witnessing is a ‘Graduation Paradox’: the more we educate our youth, the less the economy seems able to absorb them.
The government’s subsidy of higher education is a noble testament intended to create a skilled workforce for a developing nation, however, as political analyst Ndumba Kamwanya suggested in our ‘Litmus Test: NDP 6 vs 2024 promises’ article, there is a mismatch between manifesto promises and practical impact.
The 2026 State of the Nation Address (SONA) applauded the 130,000 new jobs registered with the Social Security Commission, yet the NSA reports that the total employed population actually decreased by over 178,000 people since 2018.
The disconnect lies in the nature of our economy and as Namibia Economic Freedom Fighter’s Kalimbo Iipumbu rightly points out in that same article, our extractive sectors are capital-intensive, not labor-intensive.
We are graduating engineers and scientists into an economy that still relies heavily on elementary occupations (simple, routine tasks, often requiring physical effort and hand-held tools, with little to no formal education needed), which account for 21.8 percent of all jobs.
Without a radical shift toward local industrialisation and downstream value chains, the degree in a graduate’s hand is little more than a receipt for years of hard work that the market cannot yet redeem.
We cannot continue to celebrate the strengthening of postgraduate profiles if those PhD and Master’s holders end up in the potential labor force, a group where 96.8 percent are classified as discouraged job seekers who have given up hope.
The ceremonies of May must become more than just a tradition, they must become a call to action for structural economic reform.
Otherwise, we are simply educating our youth for export or for a lifetime of underemployment.
