Youth service to fall under Nujoma's office

Concern has been raised over the recent transfer of Namibia's National Youth Service (NYS) from the ministry of higher education and training to President Sam Nujoma's office. In a recent statement announcing his decision, Nujoma noted that under the NYS programme, "thousands of our youth from all the regions of our country have been trained and have been absorbed in the uniformed services and institutions of education and training". The purpose of the NYS is to provide skills training to youths outside of the formal education system. Signalling a new direction for the NYS, which was founded in 1998, the president said that it would be "transformed into an effective agency to assist other agencies in dealing with national emergencies, such as floods, fires and drought relief". Analyst Christiaan Keulder of the Institute for Public Policy Research told IRIN that the transfer of the NYS to Nujoma's office could be seen as "a strategy to get [political] control of young people". He noted that by 2008, "Namibia will have the first generation of voters born after independence ... a generation that does not have any experience of both colonialism and the liberation struggle". "The ruling party, as in any other state, tries to gain control of possibly important segments of society who could pose some sort of challenge to it," Keulder suggested. In 2002 Nujoma reportedly threatened to dismiss 400 NYS recruits after they marched to the capital Windhoek to hand him a petition demanding jobs. He reminded them that many young people had sacrificed their lives during the struggle for independence. The recruits had complained that they had received neither the training, nor the jobs they were promised when they enlisted in the service.