By Gabriel Nghituwamata Haulyamayi
Namibia wants to become “a highly industrialised upper-middle-income nation”, as Vision 2030 boldly declares. We have repeated the slogan for decades.
Yet the uncomfortable truth is this: without a critical mass of home-grown industrialists – not just miners, traders or civil servants in suits – that vision will remain a PowerPoint dream.
Industrialisation is not a policy document. It is not a special economic zone with empty factories waiting for a European investor who never arrives.
Industrialisation is people – ambitious, risk-taking, factory-building, profit-obsessed people who wake up every morning determined to turn fish, uranium, lithium or sunshine into higher-value products inside Namibia, not in Antwerp, Rotterdam or Guangzhou.
We already have the raw materials. We have ports, railways, cheap renewable energy on the horizon, and preferential access to the EU, US, UK and soon a 300-million-person SADC market. What we still lack are enough Namibian industrialists with the capital, the networks and, above all, the mindset to dominate these value chains.
Look at history. Britain did not industrialise because Queen Victoria wrote a nice industrial policy. It industrialised because men like Richard Arkwright, Josiah Wedgwood and later Andrew Carnegie built factories, crushed competitors, reinvested profits and dragged their nations forward. South Korea’s miracle was not led by bureaucrats; it was driven by the likes of Chung Ju-yung (Hyundai) and Lee Byung-chul (Samsung) – industrialists who were given space to grow, not endless committees to attend.
Namibia has produced brilliant industrialists (the Pupkewitz dynasty, the Ohlthaver & List empire, Frans Indongo, Sven Thieme, Knowledge Katti and others), Impressive as these are, they remain one or two steps removed from the core act of industrialisation: taking Namibia’s abundant raw materials – raw ore, fish, grapes, beef or lithium out of the ground or the sea and turn it into batteries, ferro-alloys, wine bottles, leather goods or EV-grade chemicals right here on our soil. That is where true industrialisation begins.
Today, most of our manufacturing is “manu-fractured” – small-scale, under-capitalised, and terrified of competition once the infant-industry protection is lifted. We celebrate turning grapes into wine or fish into fillets, yet we still import the bottles, the corks, the cartons and the freezer bags. Every missing industrialist is a missing factory, a missing cluster of SMEs, and thousands of missing middle-class jobs.
The state cannot substitute for industrialists. It can build roads, keep electricity prices low, reform the Investment Centre, and stop changing the rules every budget speech – but it cannot have the animal spirits that drive a Harold Pupkewitz to open a hardware store in 1946 with almost nothing and turn it into a N$10-billion conglomerate. Only entrepreneurs can do that.
So what must change?
1. Celebrate wealth creators, don’t demonise them. Stop the lazy rhetoric that every rich Namibian must have stolen something. Most did not. Many took risks the rest of us were unwilling to take.
2. Fix capital markets. A pension fund with N$180 billion invested mostly overseas is a national embarrassment when local industrialists cannot raise N$50 million for a perfectly viable factory.
3. Create real industrialists-in-residence programmes. Identify 50 high-potential Namibians under 45, give them mentoring by battle-scarred industrialists from Korea, Malaysia or Chile, and give them patient capital on commercial terms.
4. Stop waiting for FDI to save us. Foreign investors will only build factories here when they see local industrialists already doing it profitably. Local pioneers de-risk the country.
Namibia does not need another study on industrialisation. We need 200 stubborn, slightly crazy Namibians who are prepared to lose sleep, lose friends, and lose money (several times) in order to build factories that will still be here in 50 years.
Until we have those industrialists – proud, loud, and unapologetic – we will remain a country that digs, fishes, farms, and dreams, but does not truly industrialise.
The ore is in the ground. The fish are in the sea. The sun is in the sky.
All that is missing is the industrialist.
Let’s stop waiting for him or her to arrive from somewhere else.
It is time we became them.
