THE WEEKENDER'S ROAST: Sweet Sixteens: Old enough for babies, too young to vote

Welcome to the Republic of Namibia – where a 16-year-old can become a parent but must wait two more years to help decide the price of formula milk.

Here, at the tender age of 16, you are considered mature enough to engage in the full-contact sport of romance – a pursuit that has historically resulted in everything from poetry to condom bursts. Yet, somehow, at that same age, you are deemed far too intellectually fragile to place an X next to a political party on a ballot paper. Apparently, placing ink on a ballot paper is riskier than engaging in copulation.

Let’s get this straight.

At 16, you may fall in love, enter relationships with all their emotional gymnastics, potentially become a parent, a role that requires feeding, nurturing and ensuring another human doesn’t drown in a bucket of water.

But apparently, you may not decide who should be held accountable for the fact that there is no polio vaccination for your newborn baby or participate in shaping the economic future of your infant.

Apparently, choosing a president is where we draw the line on youthful recklessness.

Perhaps the real issue isn’t logic, but comfort. It is far less threatening to allow young people autonomy in their private lives than it is to give them a voice in public affairs. One creates families; the other can topple governments.

And we can’t have that, can we?

It’s a fascinating hierarchy of risk. The nation has collectively agreed that a teenager can navigate relationships, heartbreak, peer pressure, and possibly raising a child but will collapse into confusion when faced with a ballot paper listing party names and logos.

You’re mature enough to buy nappies but too childish to tell that Martin Lukato would be a joke of a president or that Sacky Shanghala should be kept away from public administration.

Even more amusing is the idea that between 16 and 18, something magical happens. A transformation. A political awakening. On your 18th birthday, you don’t just get cake, you are suddenly blessed with the wisdom to distinguish between fiscal policy and empty promises.

Before that? Dangerous. Likely to vote for whoever has the nicest slogan. But you can have babies.

Of course, if maturity were truly the standard, we might need to revisit the voting age altogether.

Because if we’re being honest – and satire allows us this luxury – there are fully grown adults who treat elections like a popularity contest at a high school talent show. Or how do you explain a fully bearded, chronically unemployed man proudly hoisting a Swapo flag atop a shack where hunger and disease are the real tenants – as if loyalty can be eaten for breakfast and waved away for dinner?

But back to our 16-year-olds.

We trust them with decisions that can alter the trajectory of their entire lives, yet we shield the ballot box from their apparently volatile judgement.

There’s also a poetic irony here. The same young people who are considered too naïve to vote are often the ones most affected by decisions on education, healthcare and youth employment. They are living the consequences of policies they had no hand in choosing – a bit like being forced to eat a meal you didn’t order, cooked by a chef you weren’t allowed to hire.

Democracy, but make it selective.