Professor Goran Hyden of the University of Cape Town said this: “Turning the despair and pessimism that affect large sectors of the African people into hope and optimist will require from the planners of African development, to re-inspect the premises upon which they have based their planning for national development to date. No one escapes this challenge, there are no short cuts to progress”
My thesis position is that there is a misfit between educational planning and industrial development or better still, between education and vocational training on one hand and the job market on the other. Educational planning and implementation in Namibia have labored under extreme pressure and requires deep reflection as well as pointed policy options. For, in the words of Oginga Odinga of Kenya’s yesteryears, it is “Not yet Uhuru”.
The quality of our education shows signs of stagnation with some of the hitherto cream of the crop high schools reflecting signs of fatigue, characterized by slipping standards. Our educational situation is caught between the legacy of Apartheid education and the excitement of an independent nation state’s revolutionary educational system. When we introduced our new educational system at independence we were more determined to do away with colonial education in all its facets while not carefully assessing the new systems we engaged as models that would propel our education to high places as we contemplated the future.
Our challenge is thus: do we look at past models, read together with global trends, compared and contrasted with what we have and use this approach to contemplate the future informed by reality, or do we hold that all is well for as long as we do not rock the plans of sacred models we adopted and introduced at independence? We did not do good in educational planning and one of the mistakes we made was to disengage pre-primary education from the national education sector, and we dubbed it a challenge to communities, thus relegating foundation education to chance. This is where the disconnect entered the arena of education planning and implementation. 
Those in society who could afford, took their children to best privately owned pre-school settings while children from impoverished communities remained locked in our semi-standard backyard pre-schools, most of which we had nurtured through church programs during the struggle for liberation, albeit stymied by limited resources, in anticipation for a better educational situation at independence, to stem the tide of Apartheid education altogether.
This disconnect unfortunately prevailed for a long time, accounting for thousands of children entering primary schools and proceeding to high school, ultimately to college and university as ill-prepared products, falling short of the requisite skillfulness to fit the tertiary curriculum. This speaks volumes of the average high school teacher and college lecturer we produced through our academic conundrum over the years.
President Hifikepunye Pohamba had to call for the reintegration of pre-school education into the formal education sector as well as the physical integration and harmonization of the curriculum.  Said the president, “…a strong pre-primary and primary education are critical to the success of the country’s education system”. By this time damage was done as this disconnect had facilitated a void hard to bridge and hundreds of children were lost to education. Some had become welfare mothers while some were walking the streets of our cities, wandering in our villages on a forced march to nowhere.

We need concerted dialogue on education as we strive to make strides in education reform and renewal. Education is the cradle for sciences such as technology, economics, agriculture, engineering, medical technology and medical practice. 
Hence the requirement for our nation to deliberately draw an organic association between educational planning and national development planning. Educational planners must be informed by their reading of the national development agenda and to this effect, educational planning and implementation must be driven by contemporary research.  It is my submission that research has diminished in our society. Whereas in the past we witnessed academic publications in scientific journals and periodicals, nowadays we only read of doctors without knowing what they acquired through scholarship and we read of Professors without witnessing their professorial lectures. I remain conservative, there is no place for complacency in scholarship: you publish or you perish as an academic. This explains why so many scholars have taken to politics and the propensity persists.
The disconnect between educational planning and development on one hand and the national development agenda, will continue to bedevil the usefulness of Namibia’s educational products, as institutions will perpetually produce graduates who fit nowhere in the job market.