The school placements crisis: A government planning failure
As schools reopen for registration for the 2027 academic year, thousands of parents and learners are not celebrating new beginnings for their bundles of joy.
SEM BILLY DAVID
As schools reopen for registration for the 2027 academic year, thousands of parents and learners are not celebrating new beginnings for their bundles of joy.
Instead, they are spending their days moving from one school gate to another, standing in queues, refreshing online portals, or desperately making calls in search of a school placement that never seems to come.
The now-familiar crisis of “no space in schools” has once again hit, particularly in Khomas, and with it a painful question arises: how do we deal with this headache of school registration for our children?
The answer points not to bad luck or sudden population shocks, but to long-term weak government planning. This clearly shows that we have too few schools and inadequate classrooms to accommodate learners.
Has the ministry or government, in terms of budgeting, planned for this? Even though we want every Namibian child to be in school as a constitutional right, our government seems to struggle with planning ahead and always tends to address matters only once they have already arisen. This is weak governance.
A crisis we saw coming
