Opinion – Graduates Must Look Beyond Government Jobs

It is strange to hear people with university qualifications often blaming public and private institutions for not employing university graduates in Namibia.

This is no longer an uncommon practice in many developing and developed countries. People with university qualifications are skilled individuals in their respective fields of expertise.

These people possess skills that have the potential to enable them to become self-employed and earn a living in Namibia.

They have the ability to create self-employment if the government and the private sector fail to employ them.

The role of universities in any given country is to impart valuable skills to people and open up new opportunities for graduates to create self-employment and employ unskilled labourers.

University graduates have the potential to use their acquired knowledge and skills to earn a better living. It is really strange to hear people with university qualifications blaming the government and the private sector for failing to employ them.

In many countries around the world, skilled individuals operate businesses in the private sector that are related to their qualifications.

In Namibia, we already have successful private schools and several types of entrepreneurial institutions operating in almost every field of life.

However, some university graduates find it difficult to create job opportunities for themselves. Self-employment is already a practical option for earning a living.

Some of these successful individuals are even earning higher incomes than people working in the public and private sectors.

In the health sector, private medical practitioners who have opened their own clinics are now better off than medical doctors working in state hospitals. Many pharmacists in the private sector are also university graduates who have opted for self-employment.

It is a challenge to see university graduates in agriculture staying at home unemployed while, on the other hand, the country has a good number of people without formal agricultural qualifications who are successfully earning a living from agricultural produce and running businesses.

In the Namibian market, in almost every town, women in the informal sector who sell meat and other commodities enjoy better incomes than some civil servants working in public and private institutions.

In other developing countries, it is rare to find university graduates calling on the government to employ them. True, governments have established state universities, but this does not mean that they are obliged to employ all their graduates, let alone graduates from private universities.

In any given country, universities exist to impart knowledge and equip people with skills to find ways of earning a living, whether in the public or private sector, through competitive interviews.

If a person is not successful in the selection process, this should not be an issue.

Yes, it is not the end of life. There are other options, such as pursuing self-employment.

The role of the government is to employ the civil servants it can accommodate. However, the government is generally obliged to create an environment that is conducive to employment opportunities.

This means the government must make it possible to introduce legal frameworks that enable the private sector to establish businesses that can also create employment opportunities for the people.

It is also the role of the government to attract both local and foreign investors to the country, create job opportunities for its people and, above all, provide a conducive environment for investors to introduce technologies that support economic and industrial growth.

A strong private sector in any country is an important partner to the public sector in reducing unemployment. The government is not obliged to employ all its people.

*Ambassador Clemens Handuukeme Kashuupulwa is Namibia’s former Ambassador in Russia.

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