NSA ‘unhappy’ to reject 97 000 job seekers

• By Kaipaherue Kandjii 

The Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) statistician-general has expressed his anguish for not recruiting 97 000 job seekers as enumerators for the 2023 national population and housing census.

Alex Shimuafeni informed Confidente that although it would have been prudent to recruit 110 000 job applicants instead of only 13 000 to improve efficiency, such a decision posed a myriad of challenges, which they instead opted to avoid.

“…If it was my decision, I was even saying we should have taken all 110 [thousand] jobs then instead of [conducting the Census for] three weeks then we can do it in two or three days which is even quicker, but the challenge with that is we would have needed 110 000 tablets and [a bigger] pool of supervisors to look after all those people who could have been a challenge,” Shimuafeni said.

The CEO says he feels “bad” for rejecting such a staggering size of desperate youths, some of whom, he disclosed, went as far as “begging” him for jobs by ambushing him at his office in desperation to gain placement.

“If you have a heart, you will feel bad some of them did come to our office, and we had a meeting with my deputy and the human resources [officer] because they were begging me [for a job] because people think I decide who gets in and who doesn’t. One came with a baby which is [probably] less than a year old to demon

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