Thirty-six years after independence, Namibia is not short of plans. It is short of execution.
Opinion piece by David Brown
I first went to China in 2004, and again around 2009. In July this year I went a third time, with the business delegation accompanying President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah on her State Visit to Guangdong, Sichuan and Beijing. On the earlier trips the sky over Beijing was a grey lid. This time I walked out into clean air: and that was not my imagination. The Beijing Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau reports average fine-particulate levels of 27 micrograms per cubic metre in 2025, against 89.5 in 2013.
I build radios for a living, so I am not easily impressed by shine. What struck me was the discipline underneath it. Trains left to the second. Phones went into a depository at the start of a factory shift and came out at the tea break — for management as much as for the line.
Let me also correct the impression I came home with. China has not gone nuclear. According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, nuclear supplies just 4.6 percent of Chinese electricity, wind and solar together 22 percent, and fossil fuels, overwhelmingly coal, still around 58 percent.
What did happen is that coal generation fell in 2025 for the first time since 2015, while demand grew. China is not clean. It is bending the curve, at a scale nobody else is attempting, because somebody wrote down what the country would be in twenty years and successive governments executed it without relitigating the plan every time a minister changed.
That is the lesson. Not the hardware.
The audit nobody wants to read aloud
Now turn the same cold eye on ourselves.
In 2025 the World Bank reclassified Namibia from an upper-middle-income economy to a lower-middle-income one. After thirty-six years, we moved down a category.
The Namibia Statistics Agency puts unemployment at 36.9 percent on the strict definition and 54.8 percent on the broad one, with 44.4 percent of Namibians aged 15 to 34 out of work, in a country where roughly seven in ten people are under 35. Our Gini coefficient of 59.1 makes us the second most unequal country on earth, behind South Africa.
Transparency International’s 2025 index recorded our worst score since measurement began: 46 out of 100, a three-point fall, the largest single-year decline on our record, dropping us six places to 65th in the world.
The contradiction at the centre
Here is the fact that should end every complacent conversation about our energy policy. Namibia is the world’s third-largest uranium producer, behind Kazakhstan and Canada, supplying about 12 percent of global mined output, according to the World Nuclear Association. Uranium ore and concentrates earned N$28.1 billion in exports in 2025.
And we import between 50 and 60 percent of our own electricity from the Southern African Power Pool, most of it from Eskom.
We dig it, we crush it, we ship it. We do not refine it, convert it, enrich it, fabricate fuel from it, or burn it.
That is not an industrial policy. It is a mining lease with a flag on it.
The President is right that this must change, and her visit to China General Nuclear in Shenzhen was the most concrete signal yet. But a reactor is a twenty-year project and a conventional one is oversized for a grid with peak demand under 900 MW. The near-term prize is solar and storage, buildable in eighteen
months under the best sunlight on earth, plus one step at a time up the uranium chain. Nuclear is a 2040 asset; what we should start today is the part that really takes twenty years: the regulator, the safeguards regime and the engineers to staff them.
Wounds we inflicted on ourselves
The Income Tax Amendment Act of 2020 repealed the incentives for registered manufacturers, with grandfathering that expired at the end of the 2025 tax year, and the Export Processing Zone regime was wound down over the same period. The Special Economic Zones Bill, promising a 20 percent corporate rate and a one-stop shop, has been at “an advanced stage” since 2023 and is still not law. For a Namibian manufacturer in 2026 there is simply a hole where industrial policy used to be. A general rate cut is not an industrial strategy.
In March 2026 CRAN rejected Starlink’s licence application: it met three of six statutory criteria and failed on ownership, national security and compliance history. CRAN then dismissed 624 reconsideration requests, almost all from ordinary Namibians.
I take the ownership rule seriously; it is the law. But a farmer in Kavango cannot buy the best rural broadband available, while an equally foreign-owned Inmarsat terminal is unremarkable. If the objection is security, publish the terms on which it could be met.
If the rule was written for a different technology, amend the rule.
And the complaint I hear most often from foreign partners is not about tax at all. It is about time. Permits take months, with no statutory clock, no deemed approval and no explanation when they stall. When a visa for a commissioning engineer takes six months, the project does not wait for Namibia. It moves.
Force, authority, service Some of what holds us back costs nothing to fix, because it is not budget or legislation. It is posture.
We call our police a force. Force against whom? Criminals are a fraction of one percent of the population.
The other ninety-nine-point-something percent are people who need an accident report signed, a passport renewed, or a drunk driver taken off the road at four in the morning. A police service does those things for its people. A police force does them to them.
South Africa understood this at the moment it mattered most. In 1995 it renamed the South African Police Force the South African Police Service, and its own government describes that change as reflecting “our transition to democracy and commitment to constitutionalism”. Botswana and Kenya use Service too. A free country does not need to describe itself to its own citizens as a force.
None of this means soft policing. A service still needs a hard edge: a specialised unit, properly selected, armed and trained, for serious organised crime, hostage situations and terrorism. But it should be exactly that: a department, held to its own standard and deployed when the situation demands it, not the default posture of every officer at every counter. South Africa’s Special Task Force is a paramilitary unit and it sits inside a Service. That is the model: a service for the ninety-nine percent, a specialist unit for the one.
It is the same with the authorities: a communications authority, a revenue authority, a licensing authority.
Estimate honestly what these institutions actually do all day.
Ninety-nine percent of it is administrative: receiving forms, checking documents, issuing certificates, answering the telephone. Perhaps one percent is enforcement. The law already stands behind every one of them; if you transgress, the courts are there.
That power does not need to be announced in the letterhead. When the name announces enforcement, the culture follows the name, and the citizen arrives at the counter already positioned as a suspect rather than as the person the institution exists to serve.
This is not sentimentality about a word. Last September the United States renamed its Department of Defense the Department of War: in law only a secondary title, because only Congress can change the statute, but nobody chooses a name like that by accident. Governments pick names for exactly this
reason: to set the posture of everyone who works under them. We should do the same thing in the opposite direction. We are not a dictatorship. We are a constitutional democracy of free people, and the way the state addresses the citizen should say so on the front door.
Then measure them like services. Publish the median turnaround time for every licence, permit and registration, every quarter, by office. Nothing changes a queue faster than publishing how long it is, and it is the cheapest reform available to us.
The customs union we did not design
And then there is SACU, which almost nobody wants to discuss in public. The common external tariff Namibia applies is not set in Windhoek. The 2002 SACU Agreement provided for an independent Tariff Board; twenty-four years later it still has not been established, and SACU’s own website records that the
Council has mandated South Africa’s International Trade Administration Commission to handle tariff applications “on an interim basis”. ITAC is a South African body, created under South African law, to serve South African trade and industrial policy. Namibia legislated for a national trade body of its own and never made it operational. We have no seat at that table because we never built the chair.
Look at what it produces. A light vehicle from a country with no trade agreement with South Africa attracts 25 percent duty; one from the European Union attracts 18. On top sits an ad valorem luxury duty of up to 30 percent, then VAT on the inflated total. The BYD Seagull sells in China from about US$10,300, roughly N$185,000 before shipping. Namibia has no vehicle industry for that wall to protect. It protects assembly plants in Gqeberha and East London that build petrol and diesel cars, and it stands highest against precisely the cheapest electric cars on earth. I am not against protecting South African jobs; I have argued all my career that Namibia should protect its own. But protection with no sunset and no performance test becomes a transfer from Namibian households to producers in another country.
The honest complication is that the same wall pays our bills. SACU transfers are about 27 percent of government revenue: N$28.1 billion in 2024/25, falling to roughly N$21 billion the following year. The IMF’s 2026 Article IV consultation puts our fiscal balance excluding SACU receipts at minus 13.2 percent of GDP. Worse, the sharing formula pays out on our share of intra-SACU imports. The more we buy from South Africa, the bigger our cheque. We are paid to remain a customer.
So the answer is not to walk out. It is to stop being a passenger. Make Namibia’s national trade body operational and press for the Tariff Board the Agreement promised. Ask for a clean-technology tariff line: there is no SACU electric vehicle industry yet to protect.
And use Article 26, which lets Namibia levy additional duties to protect an infant industry of our own for up to eight years, a tool we have barely touched. At the SACU Summit in Cape Town in June, President Ramaphosa said the union chooses “industrialisation over dependence”. Namibia should hold him to it, and mean it about our own industry too.
What we must not throw away
An article that only lists failures is a rant. Namibia holds assets almost no competitor can match. Reporters Without Borders ranked us in the world’s top thirty for press freedom in 2026 and first or second in Africa, ahead of the United States, in the city where the Windhoek Declaration was signed in 1991. We have thirty-six years of peace, independent courts, a working port with spare capacity, world-class sun and wind, and genuine non-alignment while the great powers force everyone else to choose. Rwanda is the comparison everyone reaches for, including me, but Kigali sits near the bottom of the world for press freedom and earns a fifth of our income per head. Import their execution. Keep our freedoms.
Six things, this session
1. Pass the Special Economic Zones Act, and restore a manufacturing incentive in the interim.
2. 3. Put a statutory clock on every permit: thirty working days for a work permit tied to an approved investment, sixty for residence, deemed granted if the deadline passes. Publish turnaround times by office, every quarter.
Rename the authorities as services, and the police force as a police service. It requires no budget, and it changes how every counter in the country meets a citizen.
4. Legislate energy self-sufficiency by 2032 and tender it openly.
5. Take a seat on the tariff. Make our national trade administration body operational, press for the SACU Tariff Board, and apply for a clean-technology tariff line before the electric vehicle wall hardens around an industry that does not yet exist.
6. Ring-fence petroleum revenue in a sovereign wealth fund with a statutory spending rule: before the first barrel is lifted, not after, when the claims will already be political.
We are not short of plans. We have Vision 2030, six national development plans, Growth at Home, Harambee, a green hydrogen strategy and a nuclear industry strategy. What we are short of is decision.
What an investor meets instead is procedure: the project becomes an application, the application becomes a queue, and the queue becomes an indecision that nobody will put their name to. Plans do not build factories. Decisions build factories — taken on time, by someone prepared to be accountable for them.
A country of three million people sitting on uranium, copper, gold, diamonds, oil, sunlight, wind and a deep-water port, with a free press and courts that work, has no business having half its young people out of work. That is not fate. It is the accumulated result of decisions we made and decisions we deferred.
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David Brown is the founder and managing director of Sat-Com (Pty) Ltd, a Namibian manufacturer of military communications equipment. He writes in his personal capacity.
Sources
Beijing Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau; Ember; World Bank; International Monetary Fund; Namibia Statistics Agency; Transparency International; Afrobarometer; World Nuclear Association; SACREEE; PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries; UNCTAD; Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia; Reporters Without Borders; Southern African Customs Union; tralac; naamsa; CnEVPost; Namibian Presidency.
