Guest writer. Kaaronda Evalistus, NUNW’s General Secretary
The National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW) is pleased to be associated with an idea as noble as this one. Child labour had grown over the past years and assumed unimagined global proportions estimated in 2005 at about 250 million children between the ages of five (5) and fourteen (14) of whom 120 million are said to have been employed on a full time basis. Whichever way one looks at it, child labour has the effect of depriving children their right to proper and sound physical, moral and intellectual development as they are coerced into taking adult responsibilities prematurely.
Namibia is of course no exception to the above as the rapidly increasing effects of HIV/AIDS take their toll on the many of her citizens, leaving many of the house holds headed by children. This situation is even worse for children in rural Namibia, all of whom are in subsistence agriculture. Child labour in Namibia is compounded by an acute lack of data, particularly on the size of it and its growth trajectories. It is generally clear that where poverty thrives, child labour equally thrives unhindered. A classical example that comes to mind is that of a small, as it were, a minority group called the San community or the Bushmen. Adult members of this Namibian community have for a considerable number of decades worked as cheap farm labourers on both commercial as well as communal agricultural farm lands in Namibia.
Given the meagre or starvation wages paid to them, they had to complement their household incomes by having their children join them as labourers for their bosses. This stark reality in our view is what characterises child labour in all countries where it exists. If at all there is a common denominator conspicuously present in child labour, poverty will take centre stage prominence!
In 1999 the Namibian government undertook a child activity survey with the primary aim of achieving the following amongst others:
• to establish the extent of exploitative labour involving children under the age of 18 years,
• to determine the causes, nature and consequences of such labour wherever it is found,
• to direct action programmes, analyse existing policies and programmes as well as identify policy gaps so as to formulate action programmes.
This survey came immediately after Namibia had ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children as well as the ILO Convention on Worst Forms of Child Labour in 1999. All in all the survey found that child labour was on the increase and that it was largely characterised by activities in which children are used such as theft, housebreaking, selling drugs, prostitution (streets, bars and truck stops), commercial agriculture especially in the production of charcoal in the northern parts of the country.
Despite the above findings and noble aims of the government’s survey, as a union we feel that child labour needs not be worse for it to be considered a problem or priority. It needs to exist and its existence must is and must be reason enough to fight it. It is in view of this and numerous other facts that the NUNW also in 1999 established its national committee on child labour to help add organised labour’s voice to the fight against this scourge. Children’s place is at home and or school and not in any less or more dangerous places of work such as mines, garment factories or agriculture where they could be exposed to hazardous dust and pesticides.
Finally, we wish to thank all involved for their relentless efforts aimed at bringing sanity to all unscrupulous capitalists and have them refrain from using child labour.