The Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, which claimed the lives of more than 4 080 Namibians, exposed shortcomings in the country’s social protection programmes.
This is according to a report released last week by the Labour Resource and Research Institute (LaRRI). The study focuses on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on workers and its effects on trade union benefits and services to workers.
Apart from the child social grant, the old-age pension and veterans’ grants, the study said all adults above 18 and below 60 who are not disabled are not covered by any form of the social protection programme.
Thus, a programme, such as unemployment insurance, would have been useful to everyone to cope with the pandemic if Namibia had such a social protection programme. “The state was only able to pay a once-off pandemic relief of N$750 for the unemployed and those retrenched due to the pandemic. Those in the informal economy were not at all supported,” the report stated.
“Some workers, such as domestic workers, who did not have smartphones or internet were unable to apply for the N$750 relief.”
The report added the pandemic also highlighted the fragility of the Namibian political economy.
The Namibian Employers Federation (NEF) in October 2022 said 815 registered companies and closed corporations voluntarily deregistered between January 2020 and February 2021. This was mainly due to tremendous financial pressure, as companies failed to make profits due to disruptions from the pandemic.
These figures were confirmed in a report released by the NEF in partnership with the Skills Initiative for Africa (SIFA), titled ‘The Rapid Assessment of Reskilling and Upskilling Need Arising from Effects of the Covid-19 Crisis’.
The report said in 2020, 896 companies retrenched 12 198 workers. Meanwhile, government recently launched Social Protection Policy 2021-2030, which is expected to outline comprehensive interventions to achieve the eradication of poverty. The policy states that social protection must help people “cope with the risks, vulnerabilities and shocks throughout their life cycle”. This includes poverty, illness, hunger, lack of income, inability to access education, health sanitation, housing, etc. Analysts have said the policy documents have played a big role in reducing the poverty gap, especially the universal old-age pension. However, when it comes to the actual interventions, the document does not propose any new or bold steps. It also does not even introduce a universal child grant, which was still envisaged in the draft policy of 2019.
“Instead, the policy merely proposes to sustain the current children’s grants, old age grants, disability grants and veterans’ grants – and this is not enough to deal with the current crisis faced by most Namibian households,” analysts stated
Covid-19 impact on trade unions
Furthermore, according to the report, the pandemic proved to be a big challenge to trade unions to continuously represent their members and offer them adequate services.
“Trade unions were affected, as their ability to represent workers was curtailed by policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” said LaRRI. The report said keeping the line of communication open and accessible to their members at their workplace became a challenge to unions that required innovative approaches.
The report says the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic was on two levels: getting infected with the virus and dying, as well as the government’s policy response to prevent the spread of the virus. “Both of these had the effect of disrupting the normal flow of social and economic activities in society. The movement and gathering of people were restricted by the government health emergency policy to prevent the spread of the virus,” said LaRRI. This, the report said, meant that business enterprises were affected, as they could not operate at their normal capacity due to the absence of the needed workers, whose movements were restricted, depending on the business sector and the requirement to minimise the number of people who could congregate at a workplace at the same time. “Some workers were compelled to work remotely, where the nature of their work permitted. Some work could not be executed from home because a worker had to be physically present at the workplace to carry out their duties, leading to businesses suffering,” stated the report.