AR’s actions commendable but garbage
By Victor Angula |
As I watched a video of the AR confronting a Chinese employer in front of his employees, it made me to wonder just what kind of situation are we in as a country.
Have we gone down so much that people would be tortured by their employer and still come back to work? Is this not slavery of the modern times? Workers are enslaved to their jobs to such an extent that even if they are being mistreated and tortured, they will still come back to work!
So now the actions of the AR are commendable. But such actions are just garbage. Such approach will not produce anything productive. For the fact that these people keep on coming to work even while their working conditions are such terrible, it’s because they desperately need those jobs.
Now when AR says they will come back to close down the business of this China man, the result will be that those employees will be jobless. So what did you achieve? The China man can also decide to lock the gates of his property and put up a poster saying “no wek”.
It will be the Namibian citizens who will be out of work. For the fact that our people are willing to work even when they are being abused, this tells us of something that goes deeper than anything of the sort which AR trying to address.
Institutionalised unemployment is the problem which AR and everybody else must target. Solve the problem of institutionalised unemployment. Come up with an employment creation policy and get job opportunities available for the people to choose whom do they want to work for.
When there are no employment opportunities, so that people will be willing to sacrifice their human rights just so that they can get a chance to put bread on the table, then everything else you do in terms of workers’ rights is just useless and garbage.
A country without plans on how to create employment is a country at the mercy of ruthless and exploitative employers.
AR is trying to address the symptoms of the situation of high unemployment in this country. Symptoms come from a sickness. The sickness here is the high unemployment rate in our society.
And the only cure for it is policies, plans and actions aimed at solving unemployment in the society so that our people will not be forced to go prostituting themselves just so that they may be able to earn a living.
