EDITORIAL: Don’t politicise unemployment

President Hage Geingob, in his State of the Nation Address, conceded we have unacceptably high unemployment rates. The opposition agrees we have such a crisis and – most importantly – the unemployed themselves feel the crunch.

Against that overwhelming evidence, it’s clear the nation is singing from the same hymn book as far as unemployment is concerned. If there has never been national consensus on anything, we now have it. Unemployment is now the common denominator – uniting all Namibians to speak the same language.

So, what are we quarrelling about? Why are we politicising the discourse on unemployment? Why is it permissible for the ruling party to admit to this crisis publicly, but the moment someone from outside the party makes the same conclusion, we call them unsavoury names – such as political opportunists?

Who possesses the monopoly on the unemployment discourse?

Now that we have consensus, we ought to be sitting around the same table – for once – and putting political allegiances aside for the sake of the unemployed common man wandering the streets and looking to the sky for divine intervention.

Instead, big d*ck politics and egos reign supreme at the expense of finding a solution to a problem we all agree needs urgent attention. As a result, we end up arresting and persecuting those who say exactly the same thing as us, but who happen to wear a different political hat to our own.