The Namibian Defence Force will recruit between 1 400 and 1 600 trainees for the second year in a row, defence executive director Wilhemina Shivute announced.
The director said this in a letter addressed to regional governors, dated 2 June 2023, seen by this paper.
“The NDF will recruit 1 400 to 1 600 new members in the force through the Namibian Defence Force Recruitment Planning Committee (NDF RPC),” Shivute informed the governors.
The NDF RPC will oversee the process in all 14 regions.
“The regional allocation of members are Khomas (141), Ohangwena (199), Omusati (199) and all the other remaining 11 regions (111),” she said.
The ministry also allocated special slots to marginalised communities.
“Governors are humbly requested to deliver all the applications forms of marginalised communities after the closing date to the Office of the Vice President,” she added.
She added: “Also convey the message to all constituency councillors that application forms received should be stamped and recorded… constituency councillors should assist all candidates, and no candidate should be turned away,” Shivute also instructed.
Last year, over 100 000 Namibians applied for the most recent defence intake, with just 57 000 meeting the requirements.
The ongoing training is likely to run until August this year after the recruits reported for training on 7 November 2022.
Last year, the NDF took in 1 400 new cadets, a process that was lauded as a representation of a true Namibian army, with each political region securing a minimum of 103 slots.
Only the more densely-populated Ohangwena (117), Omusati (117) and Khomas (133) have more cadets.
The NDF was deliberate about ensuring that recruitment reflected the ethnic makeup of the country: a Namibian house, wherein all have equal opportunity.
This is why the recruitment process was decentralised to each of the 14 political regions and 121 constituencies, as opposed to a centralised one, whose outcome would normally be decided in Windhoek.
In the past, the recruitment was directly proportional to each region’s population.
This meant that the more populous a given region is, the more members it would send to the force.
This meant less populated regions, such as Hardap, with fewer than 80 000 inhabitants, would secure only less than 20 slots during the given recruitment, which is not the case now when juxtaposed with the 103 recruits it sent last year.
Things changed in 2022 when the NDF management decided that each region must get an equal share, irrespective of the number of its inhabitants.
The force also went a step further, deploying a watertight vetting process to ensure the majority of those being recruited from specific regions originally hail from those regions.