Opinions

Why SRC and LRC training matters in Namibia Tim Martins In Namibia, young people make up an important part of the country’s future. Schools, colleges and universities are not only places where young people acquire academic knowledge; they are also environments where future leaders are developed. Student Representative Councils (SRCs) and Learner Representative Councils (LRCs) play an important role in this process by giving young people an opportunity to represent their peers, participate in decision-making and develop leadership experience. However, being elected as an SRC or LRC member comes with responsibilities that cannot be taken lightly.  Leaders are expected to…

Jeronimo Kateya From the ancient canals of Wuzhen to Windhoek's digital ambitions, Beijing's message yesterday was clear: the future of the internet must be open, shared, and inclusive. The 2026 World Internet Conference (WIC) Wuzhen Summit will be held from November 2 to 5 in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, China, organizers announced at a press conference held in Beijing on September 29, 2026. The summit, hosted by the World Internet Conference and organized by the People's Government of Zhejiang Province, will run under the theme Open Source and Openness, Collaborative Development and Shared Benefits - Jointly Building a Community with a…

Customer Service Week is a good moment to ask about the five miles we put in the customer’s way Linda Shininge Customer Service Week runs from 5 to 9 October, with Global Customer Experience Day on the 6th. Across Namibia, organisations will thank the people who serve customers every day. That is deserved. But it invites a harder question: why does anyone need to go the extra mile in the first place? Peter Drucker argued in The Practice of Management (1954) that a business's purpose is to create a customer. Most organisations would agree. Look at how they are built,…

Paul T. Shipale (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar) How far will the hunger for power go before the nation begins to pay the price? That is the question that every political generation eventually has to confront on how far are those who hold power prepared to go to keep it? How much compromise is too much? How much institutional damage is acceptable? How much public trust can be consumed in the pursuit of political survival?  And at what point does the pursuit of power cease to be about serving the nation and become an exercise in protecting positions,…

Sem Billy David Residents of Windhoek expect City Council meetings to address the urgent problems affecting their daily lives: housing, land, informal settlements, street trading, service delivery, infrastructure, sanitation and municipal accountability. However, there is growing public concern that council meetings are spending disproportionate amounts of time on procedural matters, including the confirmation and approval of minutes, while petitions and motions dealing directly with residents’ problems remain unresolved or do not appear on the council agenda. A council exists to debate matters of public importance, pass resolutions and direct the administration to implement those decisions. When meetings repeatedly focus on…

The question for Namibia is whether a country with a small economy, high unemployment, limited industrialisation and an urgent need to create opportunities for young people should see AI primarily as a threat or as an extraordinary opportunity. Recent research by PwC, based on more than one billion online job advertisements across six continents, provides an important corrective to the fear that AI simply means mass unemployment. Its findings suggest something more complicated: AI is not merely eliminating jobs. It is segmenting and reshaping them. Some jobs are becoming professionalised. Routine processes are increasingly handled by machines, leaving humans with…

AWIE THOMPSON Agriculture has always demanded resilience. But there are moments when that word carries considerably more weight than usual. For livestock farmers affected by the current Foot-and-Mouth Disease situation, this is one of those moments. Movement restrictions and uncertainty around market access have very real consequences for farming operations, cash flow and livelihoods. Behind every affected farming business are families, employees and communities whose incomes are connected to agriculture. Having spent seven years in primary agriculture, farming cattle and crops and working in agro-processing, I understand that these pressures cannot simply be reduced to numbers on a balance sheet.…

Kae Matundu Tjiparuro “Revolutions are made not by the deputies in parliament, but by the masses,” wrote French Marxist Louis Althusser in his rendition of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Yours Truly Ideologically cannot but muse what the honourable members of our august houses, that is the National Assembly (NA) and the National Council (NC), composing Namibia's parliament, would say and have to say about this excerpt and posit from Althusser. In view of the fact that, albeit him, parliament cannot but be just another apparatus of the state. In fact, there is and can be no denial that parliament…

Stanley Nick Katzao When United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres delivered his final address to the General Assembly, he offered a sobering truth: “The United Nations exists because power requires rules—and humanity needs a place where power answers to principle.” It was a profound appeal for multilateral sanity in an era fractured by unilateral aggression. Yet, for the nations of Southern Africa, and particularly Namibia, this statement diagnoses a historic wound. For decades, the horseshoe chamber of the UN Security Council (UNSC) has served as the exact antithesis of Guterres’s vision: a place where principle has repeatedly yielded to the interests…