Towards a comprehensive integrated youth development strategy
From 4-5 November 2022, LPM Party Chief Whip, Hon. Henny Seibeb attended a Southern African Development Community Parliamentary Forum (SADCPF) Regional Policy Dialogue on “Strengthening Separation of Powers & Parliamentary Oversight in the SADC Region: A Leap towards Democratic Accountability and Inclusive Governance” in Johannesburg, South Africa. The main objective of the Regional Policy Dialogue was to create a platform for parliamentarians to engage with stakeholders on the context and strategies for strengthening democratic accountability through parliamentary interventions and advancing human rights to build the democratic drive across the SADC region. The discussions centred around how to enhance the role of parliaments in promoting inclusive governance through youth political participation and representation and an overview of youth priority issues in the SADC region and benchmarking parliamentary engagement with young people in the SADC region.
On 22-23 May 2021, the Landless People’s Movement Youth Command Element (LPM-YCE) held a leadership conference at Shalom Centre in Windhoek themed ‘Reigniting youth participation in modern politics’. The conference reflected on youth issues and the key outcome of such deliberations was the proposal of the Comprehensive Integrated Youth Development Strategy (CIYDS). In 2021, the Third Revision of the National Youth Policy (2020-2030) was approved in the National Assembly but this alone will not serve its full potential unless it is accompanied by an implementation plan, such as the one proposed by the LPM YCE. The challenge is often in the implementation of such ambitious government plans and how we mobilise funding and appropriate skills sets to realise our collective visions from “below”. The Ministry of Sport, Youth and National Service is unwillingly to accede to such demands in what could be described as the “politicization of the youth agenda”.
At the SADC-PF Regional Policy Dialogue, one of the key demands by the youth was to “de-politicize” the national youth agencies and ensure equitable access to the national youth development funds. This is rightly so because in Namibia countless promises have been made with regards to the creation of a National Youth Fund, including ensuring access to credit facilities but this has merely become a political rhetoric at every election cycle. The youth representing 36.8% of the total population are also facing the highest youth unemployment rate estimated to be hovering around 46.1% (Namibia Labour Force Survey, 2018). This results in many young people of productive age to be dependent on other relatives. This has dire consequences in terms of reaping the demographic dividend. Class antagonism develops and the end result will be a revolutionary rupture but such a “ruptural” vision of change could be move in the direction of a more profoundly egalitarian social order by adopting the twin visions of a Comprehensive Integrated Youth Development Strategy (CIYDS) and a New Integrated Rural Development Strategy to close the rural-urban inequality gap, rural-urban poverty gap and create much needed jobs. Namibia had a National Rural Development Strategy 2013/14-2017/18 (NRDS) to address rural poverty, inequality, unemployment, and rural infrastructure development gap. However, due to absence of any monitoring and evaluation of government programmes, it is difficult to quantify, the success and the desired outcomes.
The Third National Youth Policy is premised on four essential pillars, youth education and skills development; youth health and well-being; youth employment and economic empowerment, and; youth political and civic participation. Apart from youth economic empowerment, the rest are not necessarily strong pillars, as the youth remains an “exploited class” with no factors of production (ownership) of land, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship. Thus, the current National Youth Policy is merely a continuation of existing government social welfare and political programmes, which are already covered in the fields of health, education, arts and culture, sport, youth and national service.
The chief policymakers at the youth ministry misunderstood the concept of youth development and empowerment in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and postCovid-19. The third national youth policy remains a vague document on the class agenda, as no thought was applied on the class-analytic perspective of the youth, as an exploited underclass. A policy document must always have a deliberate class agenda and provide measures to achieve such a particular class agenda. The SADC-PF Regional Policy Dialogue noted that youth inclusion is imperative in governance processes, as youth are central in shaping more productive and functional societies. Further, it concluded that parliaments must facilitate enabling legislation to ensure youth active engagement through mechanisms such as youth quotas, parliamentary youth caucus, enactment of SADC Youth Protocol, appoint real-age youth in strategic positions and support youth friendly budgets at national level.
Therefore, we call on President Hage Geingob to accord LPM Youth Command Element leadership audience, early in 2023 to present to him the proposed Comprehensive Integrated Youth Development Strategy (CIYDS) with an honest “de-politicized” approach to craft and approve an implementation plan to translate the policy priorities proposed under the National Youth Policy into concrete programmes with budgets, targets, and a monitoring and evaluation mechanism. The strategy, if legislated, will be a substantive instrument to improving the lives of our young people. CIYDS, beyond being a blueprint for the National Youth Policy and a coordination instrument, shall also serve as the youth sector’s contribution to the national goals of reducing poverty, inequalities and unemployment as expressed in the National Development Plans and Vision 2030. These goals are at the core of our development agenda, operationalised through the yearly medium-term expenditure framework.