Namibia is currently wrestling with a devastating paradox: a massive generation of capable, educated young citizens with nowhere to go, and an expensive network of State-owned logistical assets doing absolutely nothing.

The national youth unemployment rate hovers at an unacceptable, critical threshold, and rises further if we include discouraged job seekers who have given up on the formal market. Our young people are not failing the country. The state is failing to build bridges that connect their labour to our national development assets. Nowhere is this failure more visible than in the structural and operational paralysis of TransNamib, our national rail operator.

Infrastructure is supposed to be the circulatory system of an economy, moving goods, services and human capital to catalyse growth.

Instead, major components of Namibia’s rail network have become expensive, dormant monuments to operational stagnation.

Every dormant track, unmaintained rail corridor and grounded train wagon represents thousands of lost technical jobs and logistical roles that could be absorbing our desperate youth.

As the State permits its infrastructural giants to decay into liabilities, youth frustration is reaching a boiling point.

The State cannot continue to fund tertiary qualifications while allowing the actual industrial sectors capable of employing those degree-holders to remain completely comatose.

Leveraging Lobito project 

Namibia stands at a perilous logistical crossroads. Whilst our national youth unemployment rate paralyses a generation, our neighbours are engineering an economic renaissance.

The multimillion-dollar Lobito Corridor project, backed by a massive financial close, including US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and African Development Bank investments, is rapidly moving from blueprint to steel.

The initiative is successfully modernising a massive rail network from Angola’s Atlantic coast into the mineral-rich heartlands of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia.

For Namibia, this global mega-project is both a severe threat and an unprecedented lifeline.

The Port of Lobito is now a fierce regional competitor, aggressively pulling lucrative copperbelt freight away from our traditional Walvis Bay corridors.

Namibia cannot afford to sit on the sidelines of Africa’s railway revolution.

It must aggressively leverage the Lobito Corridor to jumpstart our dormant national infrastructure and put our idle youth to work.

Currently, the Lobito railway stops approximately 600km away from Namibia’s northern rail terminus in Oshikango.

TransNamib’s line between Ondangwa and Oshikango has been completely dormant, citing economic hurdles and a lack of commercial viability.

This is a severe failure of economic imagination. The Oshikango line is stagnant because it ends in a cul-de-sac.

By aggressively spearheading a bilateral cross-border extension from Oshikango to Kuito to plug directly into the Benguela Railway, Namibia can unlock a game-changing Northern Industrial Belt.

Advancing NDP 6 

Capitalising on this regional network creates direct avenues to absorb our skilled but underutilised young workforce.

Extending the northern line will require massive civil engineering, earth-moving and construction labour.

However, the State must reserve these infrastructure roles for local youth, utilising State-backed stipends to deploy Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) graduates into immediate, hands-on employment.

Additionally, interconnecting our rail lines allows Namibia to import raw transition minerals like copper, cobalt and manganese directly into domestic youth-led processing plants, shifting our economy from raw extraction to high-value manufacturing.

Reviving regional dry ports into active, multi-national transhipment gateways creates thousands of downstream jobs for young professionals in supply chain management, customs brokerage, data analytics and digital freight tracking.

Moving beyond MOUs 

The government must synchronise its macro-industrial policies to bridge the chasm between institutional capability and real-world execution, translating financial prudence into sustainable, youth-led industrial employment.

While the State maintains good social welfare support and a tight fiscal strategy, it is recommended to devise and implement further effective strategies to ensure economic resilience and counter the untimely 2025 downward income reclassification through counter-cyclical planning and commodity diversification.

*Boysen Limbindo is a socio-economic researcher and junior public policy analyst. He holds a Master of Arts in Development Studies from the University of Namibia.