At the recent Taking Stock Namibia 2025 forum in Windhoek, experts voiced what many executives and entrepreneurs mutter in private: Namibia’s tax system is built to extract, not to grow.
The country already ranks near the top globally in tax to GDP, yet more than half the labour force is locked out of work and the manufacturing and service sectors remain stagnant. That is not an accident. It is a framework designed and maintained by the Ministry of Finance that weighs down enterprise while rewarding short term gestures.
International tax specialist Sven Helm pointed to a treaty network that is narrow and outdated, and to transfer pricing rules so vague that investors cannot plan beyond the next quarter. Who would stake millions under those conditions?
Tax holidays are announced with ceremony but without lasting credibility. Firms that might have built textile plants in the northern growth corridors—projects once pitched as job-rich anchors—leave them on paper because the tax ground shifts beneath their feet. That gap between promises and delivery is exactly what Economist Rowland Brown warns against.
Brown cut through the usual political varnish. Symbolic ownership schemes, he warned, are sold as empowerment yet create nothing tangible for people who need wages and steady work. Policy shaped to satisfy ideology rather than performance simply drives capital to safer neighbours. Botswana, for example, modernised its treaties years ago and now attracts diversified investment far beyond its size.
This is not economic policy—it is slow sabotage.
Namibia has the assets that matter: institutions that can work, infrastructure already in place, and a population that could be served and skilled. Those strengths are squandered by a tax regime that punishes ambition and blocks the investment needed to expand industries beyond the mines.
The forum laid out a clear path: modern treaties, real guidance, enforcement that is steady and fair. Without it, the tax base will keep shrinking, the job market will keep withering, and the country will keep taxing failure—and exporting its future.
*Briefly is a weekly column that’s opinionated and analytical. It sifts through the noise to make sense of the numbers, trends and headlines shaping business and the economy — with insight, wit and just enough scepticism to keep things interesting. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED ARE NOT OUR OWN; we simply relay them as part of the conversation.
