By Bertha Tobias
In Namibia, our institutional memory is often shorter than the lifespan of our political slogans. With the stroke of a pen in March 2025, oil and gas oversight moved from the Ministry of Mines and Energy to the Office of the President.
It’s a quiet administrative move on paper but a deeply political one in practice. It reflects a broader pattern of institutional fragmentation in our development trajectory which sees an over reliance on executive authority to drive complex structural transformation, often in the absence of embedded institutional continuity.
Green hydrogen has been swapped out for oil and gas as the political darling of the times. From 2021 through 2023, green hydrogen was elevated to the level of national mythology as a silver bullet for inequality, unemployment, and economic stagnation.
Government delegations led by senior government officials signed term sheets and launched the Namibia Green Hydrogen Council, an Inter-Ministerial Green Hydrogen Council (GHC) as outlined in the Harambee Prosperity plan II.
The Hyphen deal, estimated at US$10 billion, was announced with fanfare. Namibia, we were told, would leapfrog into the future. Admittedly, it could be well on its way to living up to this promise, with the March 2025 launch of HyIron’s Oshivela Plant having successfully produced southern Africa’s first green hydrogen for green iron production. That’s no small feat.
But now the political spotlight has moved. Green hydrogen has been quietly replaced by oil and gas as the presidential darling, with little in the way of institutional continuity. The Green Hydrogen Program is not law. No statutory framework guarantees its survival. Coordination across ministries is improvised, public participation is limited. When the “political oxygen” shifted, the institutional void became obvious.
We must consider how we are to lock in progress from administration to administration. What makes progress stick? Interventions must be legally rooted, politically legitimate, and resilient to shifting, short-termist political cycles.
Despite plans to institute green hydrogen and derivative-specific legislation in 2025, green hydrogen progress is currently massively exposed to the unpredictable waxing and waning of political cycles. Therefore, it is not immune to collapsing under the weight of its own hype.
This, in effect, is the fragility that Navroz Dubash and co-authors diagnose in their 2021 comparative analysis of national climate institutions. They propose a helpful typology of institutional forms that can anchor climate governance: purpose-built institutions created specifically for climate action, layered institutions where climate responsibilities are added to existing bodies or latent institutions which achieve climate outcomes as a by-product of actions not explicitly climate-related.
Namibia has relied on what is cautioned against: ad hoc, executive-led mechanisms that are neither embedded in law nor resilient to political backtracking.
The presidency’s recent assumption of direct control over oil and gas must be read in light of our collective struggle to embed resource governance within a continuous, democratic developmental state. Given what’s at stake, we must lock in progress materially as both oil production and green hydrogen are strategic geoeconomic inflection points.
Compare the lack of natural resource legislative underpinning with how resource governance is managed in jurisdictions that have built institutional buffers. In the UK, the Climate Change Committee, backed by law, sets binding carbon budgets.
In Germany, emissions targets are written into statute, and every ministry is required to meet its own decarbonisation benchmarks. In contrast, Namibia has no binding mitigation law. No inter-ministerial climate governance framework. No statutory resource planning body. And now, no independent oil and gas regulator.
This is precisely the kind of lacklustre governance approach that emerges when institutions are unstable, informal, and overly tied to political leadership, ultimately becoming vulnerable to electoral turnover and investor pressure.
The irony is that this move is happening at the exact moment when the stakes of Namibia’s resource governance have never been higher with production timelines from Shell, TotalEnergies, and Galp on the horizon.
South Africa, often invoked as our policy peer, has made more deliberate strides. The Climate Change Act, passed in 2023, provides a legal framework for carbon budgeting and emissions reporting across sectors.
Its Presidential Climate Commission, while not without flaws, is at least multi-stakeholder, consultative, and law-bound, integrating trade unions, youth, civil society, and industry in its decision-making. It is not perfect, but it exists. We have no equivalent.
Namibia, by contrast, has no binding climate legislation. No statutory resource planning body. No inter-ministerial climate governance framework. And now, no independent oil and gas oversight structure. We govern by proclamation as opposed to law.
When institutions are unstable, informal, and overly tied to political personalities, they become vulnerable to backtracking. Worse, they cannot produce the slow, structured policy feedback loops, monitoring, revision, recalibration, that long-term energy transitions demand.
Signing term sheets is easy. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I’ll even suggest that delivering keynote addresses is easy. What’s harder is building institutions that can survive the next Cabinet reshuffle, the next commodity cycle, the next presidency.
Without them, all we’re left with is hype, green or otherwise.
*Bertha Tobias is a Rhodes Scholar pursuing a full time Masters of Science in Environment, Enterprise & Sustainability at Oxford University. Connect on bertha.tobias@sant.ox.ac.uk.
