Staff Reporter
NAMIBIA has been underrated in the recently released 2021 Fraser Institute Survey of Mining Companies Report, according to the Chamber of Mines.
The report showed that the country improved marginally on the Policy Perception Index (PPI) by 0.94 points and cited Namibia as one of three African jurisdictions that improved on this score.
The other two African countries cited were Tanzania and Mauritania.
The country’s overall global PPI ranking also improved as Namibia went from the 47th position in 2020 to the 29th position in 2021.
In addition, the report stated that Namibia had the second most favourable jurisdiction in Africa, after Morocco.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Chamber of Mines, Veston Malango, stated that the absolute improvement of Namibia’s score from 74,30 points in 2020 to 75,20 in 2021 is marginal and much lower than the 80,7 and 87,22 points that the country scored in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
With this in mind, Malango acknowledged that Namibia’s policy landscape needs improvement.
However, he stated that the individual comments about Namibia featured in the report were negative and therefore had a negative impact on Namibia’s performance.
The remarks that Malango referred to stated that Namibia has a lengthy permitting process that hinders project development and also shared concerns around the non-deductibility of royalties.
Malango, however, questioned the validity of the concerns regarding the non-deductibility of royalties, pointing out that the matter was successfully resolved in 2020.
“The Chamber is of the view that this statement negatively affected Namibia’s performance. Namibia’s PPI score, and its ranking Globally and on the African continent, would have been much better without this erroneous and baseless concern as this risk is no longer applicable, and has not been in the last two years,” Malango added.
