By Simeon Tuyoleni
Ask Namibian teachers when they are happiest and the answers come quickly. Almost none of them are about teaching.
Fridays. The end of term. A long weekend. The last day before December holidays. Pay day.
These are the moments teachers name without hesitation, and they name them with a relief that is hard to miss. Children countdown to holidays too, but teachers do it louder and mean it more.
Outside the school gate something changes, though not as much as it should. They chose a profession built around children and their own children get whatever is left after everyone else’s have taken everything.
The marking bag follows them home. The lesson plans fill the weekend. The side business gets the hours that remain. They are physically present somewhere else but the job never fully lets go.
In March this year, the Omusati education director issued a directive ordering teachers to cease all income-generating activities outside their employment or face audits under Section 26 of the Public Service Act.
The official reason was conflict of commitment, fatigue and poor preparation. One teacher responded anonymously. She said her salary is swallowed by loans before it lands and her side business is not ambition, it is survival.
Another pointed out that the school directors enforcing the rule run multiple businesses themselves. The system that takes everything from teachers during school hours now wants what they built outside of it.
This is partly why teachers do not speak openly. They feel watched, and they are right to feel that way. In January this year, NANTU in the Erongo region publicly condemned threats and intimidation directed at teachers and principals over poor academic performance.
The message was clear. Perform or face consequences. Speak and someone will find a way to make you pay. One teacher said they are scared to talk. Another said colleagues were not even engaging in the conversation.
Earlier in May I wrote that the system has built good frameworks, but that following them perfectly and connecting with every child personally are two things that cannot both be done by one exhausted human being. One teacher replied with three words.
We are machines. Not as a complaint. As a confirmation. And that reply is its own answer to the question this article is asking. Machines do not have a favourite day of the week.
They do not count down to December. They do not build a small business on the side just to feel like a person again. But teachers do all of those things, and that is exactly the point.
An experienced teacher who has been in Namibian classrooms since before independence remembers when there were fewer files, fewer frameworks, and a workforce that left school equipped with real skills.
She is not being nostalgic. She is comparing. She watched the system grow heavier and produce less, with more emphasis on covering every development area and less focus on the two things that make everything else possible: reading and counting.
Teachers see all of this. They live it every day. They know exactly where the problems are. But the people who could do something about it are not the ones standing in the classroom, and the ones standing in the classroom are not being asked.
One teacher who has watched this for years put it plainly. Teachers survive disrespect from learners and parents, pressure from above, and a pile of admin that serves no one.
What she rarely sees is a supervisor walking into a school worried about poor performance or building a real plan to address it. What she does see is supervisors chasing teachers over missing lesson plans. In her years of teaching, the people entrusted with running education have been more concerned with paperwork than with what is actually happening to learners.
There are moments that still come. The learner who returns years later and says the teacher changed something for them. The class that finally understands something they have been struggling with.
The child who has been lost for weeks and then suddenly gets it. These moments are real and teachers hold onto them. The passion that brought most of them into the classroom is still there. The system has just buried it under everything else.
The numbers make it worse. In February this year NANTU accepted a five percent salary increase for 2026 and another five percent for 2027. No transport allowance increase. No housing allowance increase.
At the same time PSEMAS medical aid contributions rose from April. Teachers say the salary increase was gone before they felt it, absorbed by deductions that went up in the same month it arrived. The union accepted the deal. Teachers were not consulted.
In April this year, bush allowances for teachers in remote areas were reduced or removed. The Ministry said roads and services had improved. Teachers at Ohahati Primary School in Oshikoto said their school still has no clean water, no proper road, and the nearest clinic is eleven kilometres away.
They said they got the surprise of their lives when the money was gone. They were in debt within weeks. The hardship did not leave with the allowance. Only the allowance left.
Teachers spend most of their hours inside a classroom. That is also the one place many of them struggle to be. Some are broken down, running on empty, waiting for payday, counting the days to the next long weekend. Others still find reasons to care, not because the conditions have improved, but because there are learners sitting in front of them who need someone to show up. And so they do.
We have a culture in Namibia of silencing teachers with a simple question. What are we paying you for. It is not really a question. It is a way of saying sit down, go to work, do what you are told. It reduces everything a teacher carries to a transaction.
You get a salary, now deliver. But the person reading this article was shaped by a teacher. Not just taught. Shaped. In many cases a teacher spent more time with us than our own parents did. They saw us grow. They noticed things about us before we noticed them ourselves. The people we became passed through their hands first.
Tools like Asmbly are helping reduce some of the administrative load in Namibian classrooms, giving teachers back hours that used to disappear into paperwork. That matters. But a tool can only do so much. Until the culture around teaching changes, until teachers are genuinely respected, consulted, and supported, the relief will always be at the edges of a much deeper problem.
So when are teachers happy? The answer was in every paragraph above. It was in the Friday feeling, the side business, the retired teacher counting the days. It was not in the lesson. It was not in the classroom. And the system, rather than asking why, it started closing the doors that were left open.
* Simeon Tuyoleni, a software engineer and founder of Asmbly, where we bring together the teachers, learners, and the system to improve the quality of education in Namibia and beyond.
