Government has given airlines six months to reduce domestic airfares or face regulation. It sounds decisive. It is also incomplete.
Before issuing ultimatums, can we first fix the system that makes flying in Namibia unnecessarily expensive?
A one-way ticket from Windhoek to Ondangwa costing more than N$9,000 is absurd. The minister is right to be angry. Ordinary Namibians should not pay more to fly within their own country than they would to destinations such as Cape Town.
But outrage without reform is just theatre.
Airlines do not operate in a vacuum. Every ticket includes layers of levies, taxes and regulatory charges that quietly inflate the final price paid by passengers. Government collects from the same sector it now publicly criticises for being too expensive.
That contradiction needs to be addressed first.
Then there is fuel.
It is alleged that at Eros Airport and Ondangwa Airport, airlines are largely dealing with a single fuel supplier. There is no real competition. No pricing pressure. Just a structure where airlines absorb rising fuel costs and passengers absorb the consequences.
If government wants cheaper flights, open up airport refuelling services to competition.
Reduce the taxes. Review the levies. Cut unnecessary regulatory costs. Fix the structural issues first.
That said, airlines cannot hide behind these problems forever.
The industry often argues that low passenger volumes make cheaper fares impossible. But demand is weak largely because prices are already too high. Families drive for hours because flights are unaffordable. Businesses avoid domestic air travel because it no longer makes financial sense.
People are not refusing to fly because they dislike convenience. They are refusing because the price does not make sense.
Make fares reasonable and demand will rise.
More passengers mean fuller planes. Fuller planes create room for lower prices. It is not complicated.
Namibia wants to be a logistics hub. It wants tourism growth. It wants regional trade expansion under the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Those ambitions collapse when domestic aviation remains priced like a luxury service.
Government must stop performing outrage while benefiting from the cost structure. Airlines must stop pretending demand exists at current prices.
Fix both sides of the equation. Then talk about affordability.
*Briefly is a weekly column that is 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.
