Namibia’s government plans to spend N$5 billion a year on free tertiary education. Tuition and registration fees will vanish by 2028.
While the policy is presented as a step forward, there are concerns about its real impact.
The country already produces thousands of graduates every six months with no work ahead. The problem is not access. It is output. Employers do not want what universities produce. Degrees arrive in bulk. Competence does not. Many graduates cannot even draft a basic cohesive email.
Education Minister Sanet Steenkamp told Parliament that consultations are complete and a framework will soon follow. The fundamentals remain untouched. Teaching is weak. Curricula are outdated. Vocational training is thin. University programmes bear little connection to the economy.
President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah announced that free tertiary education would be guaranteed. The market already knows better. Namibia’s universities produce paper, not skills. Businesses report graduates unprepared, lacking technical ability and needing retraining at company expense. A degree signals time served, not readiness.
Questions have been asked how this project can succeed where others collapsed. The answer is simple. It will not. Scrapping fees will not alter the conveyor belt of unemployment. Universities now generate disillusioned graduates who queue for jobs that do not exist or settle for casual work.
The government speaks of fairness. Yet fairness is not equal access to failure. It is not opportunity if the endpoint is unemployment. Free education in a broken system is not reform. It is failure at greater scale.
N$5 billion is heavy for a small state. It will not fix teaching. It will not modernise curricula. It will not link education to the economy. It will only subsidise the continued production of unwanted graduates.
The core question is ignored. What is the value of a degree if it does not lead to work? Free education can succeed where institutions are strong and linked to labour demand. In Namibia, it cannot.
This is not investment in human capital. It is transfer of public funds to institutions that fail their mandate. The promise is free degrees. The result is a workforce trained to wait, not to work. The cost is national.
*Briefly is a weekly column that is opinionated and analytical. It sifts through the noise to make sense of the numbers, trends and headlines shaping business and the economy with insight, wit and just enough scepticism to keep things interesting. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED ARE NOT OUR OWN, we simply relay them as part of the conversation.
