By Hosea S. Neumbo
In August 2020, I wrote an article on the struggle of acquiring an internship that was published by The Namibian.
Due to the struggle that students are enduring, I, out of options, encouraged the government to offer unpaid internship opportunities to students who are willing to do it for free or voluntarily.
A year prior to that, the government would have already commenced the unlawful labour practice of employing students to work for the state without being paid. Students are left with no options but to go for what is there to complete the industrial training for them to graduate.
The system of making students work without pay under the guise of some Work-Integrated-Learning (WIL) or job attachment is unfair and unlawful, especially when the government or a certain entity has the capacity to remunerate accordingly.
If interns are helping you to improve operations, which most of the time results in enhanced productivity and increased revenue, nobility demands that you reward, compensate or pay them in return for their efforts and hard work.
Therefore, it is not right to make poor students use their own money for taxi fares to get to and from work each and every single day.
Many firms are using interns to source and attend to clients, while they are not paying them. It is so sickening to let a trainee run all your operations without reimbursing them. That is greed and exploitation of the highest, despicable order.
During internship, both parties need each other. Companies need interns as much as interns need companies to complete their WIL. The public and private sectors alike should not make it look like they are doing students a favour by giving them a chance to be mentored by them to complete their industrial training.
There is an extent to which you can push someone you are not paying.
Interns are being misused, exploited and mistreated in some ministries and private companies. Some permanent employees in the government only come to clock in, and leave interns with loads of work.
Government workers recently demanded for increments, and most of these people are not performing as they are expected to. The prime minister and Public Service Commissioners should start paying abrupt visits to ministries and other governmental agencies to see how permanent employees are behaving.
In this fraternity, working for mahala to get exposure or experience has long been normalised and romanticized. It is about time we bring some reforms, and I feel concessions should be given to interns who are helping a firm to attract clients and bank money. If you know you are going to use these newbies to make money or to improve your operations in some sort of ways, please have the courtesy to give them something, even if you are not obliged by a contract or agreement.
Is it the right thing to do to make someone’s kid work for you for nothing? Stop taking advantage of interns.
I think it is high time we scrap the whole idea of unpaid internships, and this is because some firms are getting clever by the day and using it to exploit and use students/graduates. If you can’t pay them monthly, how about you provide an adequate remuneration as a parting gift at the end of the programme? If you can’t afford to pay interns, maybe you should consider doing your stuff by yourself. Let’s stop exploiting students and graduates just because they are desperate.
A No Pay Contract is a good tactic to make you attractive to law firms and the judiciary, but no firm must use it as a mechanism to exploit and abuse interns.
The Ministry of Labour, Industrial Relations and Employment-Creation is one of the ministries that is benefitting from such level of lawlessness. This ministry offers unpaid internship opportunities to desperate students with an excuse of ‘due to budget constraints, the ministry is unable to pay interns’, yet they return millions of dollars to the treasury almost every year. This started way back before Honourable Utoni Nujoma was reshuffled to his current position, meaning this ministry has been exploiting interns for quite some time now.
What else do you expect from a ministry that fails to protect its own people from the Chinese and Indians? The seamen are crying for help, Namibians are getting paid peanuts, and foreigners are pocketing more than citizens. All seems to be fair in the eyes of those in top positions. Instead of upholding the rule of law as the custodian of the Labour Act, they are the ones infringing the laws.
The ministry allegedly returned significant figures (unused money) to the government from the previous year’s budget. Should this be worrisome? Are there some irregularities taking place in the Ministry of Labour? Is the Ministry of Labour covering up something? Should the Anti-Corruption Commission consider scrutinising the spending of the Ministry of Labour particularly the Directorate of Planning and Administration as well as Training and Development? Taking back money to the government while you are failing to pay students does not make sense. Who are you trying to impress?
Why is the government not paying interns (students)? The majority failed to get an answer to that. However, we can still get the answer from the Minister of Finance, Honourable Iipumbu Shiimi. He is the appropriate person to attend to that question. Why does the government not include interns’ remuneration in their annual budgets anymore? As an interim minister of the Ministry of Public Enterprises, Honourable Iipumbu Shiimi will also be expected to explain how mismanaged State-Owned Enterprises are able to pay interns while ministries are struggling to pay interns.
The MTC Internship Programme is one of the most interesting ongoing projects, which is not only benefiting students, but also immensely assisting universities and training centres that require students to undergo practical learning. Universities are supposed to be searching for placements for their students, and not the other way around. In order to keep this project running lucratively, the government and the corporate world should join the bandwagon.
Looking at our current population and the vast resources we have, every graduate, if not citizen, in Namibia was supposed to be getting a Basic Income Grant of at least N$3 500.
The Prime Minister should have a serious look into this matter with intentions of bettering the lives of interns. Some interns are renting, and their families are already struggling to pay off tuition fees. Interns need toiletries, lunch and other basic things, just like any other person. The government of Namibia is therefore encouraged to start doing the right thing by paying interns to lead exemplarily, or else the private sector will embrace such illegality, as it has started already. Unpaid internship is unconstitutional, and deserves to be abolished with immediate effect.