By Lot Ndamanomhata
For more than three decades, Telecom Namibia has been the backbone of the country’s communications landscape.
Established in 1992 following the corporatisation of the Directorate of Posts and Telecommunications, the wholly government-owned parastatal was entrusted with connecting a vast, sparsely populated nation to the world.
Today, it stands at a crossroads — battered by a perfect storm of ageing infrastructure, catastrophic regional investment failures, broken billing systems, recurring vandalism and theft, a haemorrhage of skilled talent, and mounting questions about whether some of the damage done to the company has been more than accidental.
This aritcle draws on over a decade of public record, financial data, regulatory findings, and senior leadership statements to piece together how one of Namibia’s most strategically important parastatals arrived at this precarious moment — and what it will take to survive.
I. The Infrastructure Crisis: Decades of Deferred Investment
At the heart of Telecom Namibia’s struggles lies an infrastructure crisis that has been building quietly for years. The company’s core network — its copper cable grid, fibre backbone, base stations, and international links — dates in large part to the 1990s and early 2000s.
While the company invested N$203 billion in infrastructure since 1992, the pace and continuity of that investment has been inconsistent, leaving critical nodes of the network vulnerable.
In 2023, Telecom Namibia CEO Dr. Stanley Shanapinda issued a stark public admission. He explained that legacy network failures, power outages, copper cable theft, and battery theft had become major contributors to service deterioration.
Windhoek, the highest-demand area in the country, was also identified as the site of the most intense vandalism — a city simultaneously most dependent on, and most destructive toward, the network that serves it.
“When a cable is cut or vandalized, it affects up to 2000 customers at a time, and it takes many man-hours or days to replace, only for it to be cut again two weeks later.” — Dr. Stanley Shanapinda, CEO, Telecom Namibia, 2023
By April 2026, the situation had deteriorated further. A catastrophic two-day outage triggered by the failure of two high-capacity international links to South Africa left customers across the country offline. The CEO again took personal accountability, describing the company’s core routing infrastructure as due for urgent replacement.
He announced that South African connectivity routes had become increasingly prone to fibre breaks, power outages, and vandalism — underscoring how Telecom Namibia’s challenges are not confined to its domestic network but are amplified by unreliable cross-border links.
The company has now announced plans to invest more than N$2.3 billion over coming years to upgrade its national telecommunications infrastructure, including expanding fibre-to-the-home services, strengthening the national fibre backbone, upgrading mobile networks from 3G to 4.5G, and preparing for 5G. A N$405 million social loan from RMB Namibia has been secured to support this five-year strategy. But critics ask: why has it taken this long, and was the deterioration preventable?
II. The Angola and South Africa Debacle: N$544 Million Down the Drain
Perhaps no episode in Telecom Namibia’s history has been more damaging — or more controversial — than its ill-fated regional expansion into Angola and South Africa in the mid-2000s. Around 2004, the parastatal made two significant investments that would haunt it for years: a 48% stake in Angola’s Mundo Startel and a 12.5% stake in Neotel South Africa. The rationale was sound on paper. With growing telecommunications markets across Southern Africa, Telecom Namibia sought to establish a regional footprint, using these investments as stepping stones into other African markets. The company committed a total of N$544 million — approximately US$80 million at prevailing exchange rates — to the two ventures.
The results were devastating. By May 2011, Telecom Namibia had pumped N$429 million into Neotel alone for its 12.5% stake, with no return. Mundo Startel’s December 2010 financial results revealed losses of US$290,000 before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation. Managing Director Frans Ndoroma was left to deliver a candid, if unflattering, assessment of the Angolan venture:
“While entering Angola was a good business case with good [expected] short-term returns, that market has proven difficult politically, culturally, regulatory and logistically. Our business plan has not run according to plan.” — Frans Ndoroma, MD, Telecom Namibia, 2011
The consequences for the company’s finances were severe. Cash reserves collapsed from N$213 million in September 2006 to just N$30 million by September 2007 — an 86% decline — primarily to fund these capital projects and regional ventures. With the company’s cash cushion evaporated, its ability to invest in domestic infrastructure maintenance and modernisation was severely curtailed. The parallel neglect of the home network during this period laid groundwork for the infrastructure failures that would intensify in subsequent years.
The African telecom environment at the time was punishing. International operators from Asia and Europe were flooding the continent with capital and competitive pricing, displacing less-innovative, under-funded African operators. Telecom South Africa’s Telkom had simultaneously lost hundreds of millions in Nigeria. Vodacom Group’s Congolese venture was yet to turn a profit. Telecom Namibia was not alone in its misfortune, but it could ill afford the losses.
The most damning postscript came a full decade later. A July 2020 report by the Windhoek Observer confirmed that Telecom Namibia had still not recovered the millions invested in the failed Mundo Startel deal — more than 16 years after the original investment was made. The Angola money, for all practical purposes, was gone. “More than 16 years on, Telecom Namibia is still to recoup its millions invested in the failed Mundo Startel deal.” — Windhoek Observer, 9 July 2020
III. The Billing System Failure: When Technology Betrays Operations
While the investment failures drained Telecom Namibia’s capital reserves, an equally corrosive problem was festering within the company’s own walls: its billing and operational support systems had become catastrophically misaligned with the network they were supposed to serve.For years, Telecom Namibia operated a patchwork of siloed billing systems — separate platforms for fixed-line, mobile, data, and business services — that did not communicate effectively with each other or with the physical network infrastructure. This fragmentation created a range of problems: billing inaccuracies, poor customer experience, an inability to generate unified financial reporting, and a structural inability to respond quickly to changing market conditions.
The company’s own official communications acknowledged the scale of the problem. Telecom Namibia’s legacy systems, it was admitted, made it difficult and expensive to meet current and future market needs and customer expectations. Systems operated in silos, making integration and the achievement of operational synergies effectively impossible.
“The implementation of a converged OSS/BSS system is the first in a line of systems and infrastructure projects to replace obsolete technologies and modernize Telecom Namibia’s network.” — Telecom Namibia official statement, 2023
The consequences of this systemic failure were not merely operational. Revenue leakage — the loss of billing income due to system gaps, errors, or inability to accurately capture usage — is a well-documented phenomenon in telecoms operating legacy billing platforms. For a company already under financial pressure from failed investments and declining landline revenues, every dollar of unbilled or incorrectly billed service represented compounded damage.
It was only in June 2023 that Telecom Namibia signed a N$327 million contract with Spanish technology company SATEC to replace its legacy billing architecture with a single, cloud-native, converged OSS/BSS (Operations Support Systems/Business Support Systems) platform. A second major agreement followed in November 2023, with Huawei, for a N$100 million fixed-mobile convergence core network. These were described as the first steps in a turnaround strategy under the company’s Integrated Strategic Business Plan 2027. As late as April 2026, CEO Shanapinda was still describing OSS/BSS modernisation as an accelerating priority meaning the replacement project remained incomplete more than two years after signing.
The landline revenue trajectory illustrates the cumulative damage. Telecom Namibia, which holds the monopoly on landline access in Namibia, saw landline subscriptions decline by approximately 40% in a single year between 2021 and June 2022. The Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia’s data confirmed that fixed voice revenues experienced a sustained downward trend as customers migrated to mobile and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol services. A billing system that could not flexibly package, price, or retain customers was poorly equipped to arrest this decline.
IV. The Human Capital Crisis: Investment in People, Lost to Retrenchments
Behind every network node, billing platform, and customer interaction is a trained human being. Telecom Namibia’s workforce history reflects the broader dysfunction of the organisation — a cycle of investment in people, followed by financial pressure, retrenchments, and the irreplaceable loss of institutional knowledge.
At its peak, the company employed 1,300 people. The telecoms sector is technically demanding: engineers trained to manage fibre optic routes, VSAT terminal networks, and increasingly complex mobile core systems represent years of investment and accumulated expertise. When financial pressure precipitated retrenchments, it was not merely headcount that was lost — it was the operational memory of the organisation.
Reports from the New Era confirmed that Telecom Namibia retrenchments were directly linked to falls in landline revenue, with the company forced to reduce its workforce as fixed-line income dried up. President Hifikepunye Pohamba had explicitly warned Telecom leadership as far back as 2007 not to resort to retrenchment as the answer to financial problems — a warning that went only partially heeded in subsequent years.
The pattern mirrors a broader African tech sector dynamic. Research on layoffs in Africa’s IT industry has documented that retrenchments disproportionately affect experienced mid-career professionals and reduce the overall institutional competency of organisations. For a parastatal like Telecom Namibia — which cannot easily compete with the private sector on remuneration to attract replacement talent — each wave of retrenchments represented a permanent capability loss.By 2023, the new CEO had acknowledged the skills gap as a priority, committing to improve workforce skills and bring in interns from higher learning institutions. But rebuilding the institutional knowledge lost through years of retrenchments and attrition cannot be achieved in a single budget cycle.
The dissolution of the parent holding company, Namibia Post and Telecommunications Holdings (NPTH), in late 2024 added further human capital complexity. Twenty-four NPTH employees found themselves in legal limbo as Cabinet’s decision to dismantle the entity left their futures uncertain, with no clear path to integration into subsidiary companies Telecom Namibia, NamPost, or MTC.
V. The Sabotage Question: Copper Theft, Cable Cutting — or Something More?
Of all the challenges facing Telecom Namibia, perhaps the most disturbing is the question of deliberate sabotage. Senior management has repeatedly used the word — and the evidence accumulated over several years is difficult to dismiss.
Copper cable theft is the most visible form of infrastructure sabotage. Driven by the high scrap value of copper, criminal networks have repeatedly targeted Telecom Namibia’s underground cable infrastructure. The scale is extraordinary: a single incident can affect up to 2,000 customers, and replacement takes days — only for the new cable to be cut again within weeks. Windhoek has been identified as the worst-affected area, with manholes repeatedly targeted.
By November 2023, the company had escalated to the highest levels of engagement. Management publicly urged the public to report suspicious behaviour near Telecom Namibia manholes. The company engaged the Namibian Police (NamPol) to accelerate prevention efforts and began lobbying lawmakers to classify copper theft and infrastructure sabotage as a serious criminal offence, recognising that existing legal deterrents were inadequate.
“We again urge all to please report any suspicious behaviour regarding copper cable theft and the sabotage of our network, particularly around Telecom Namibia’s manholes. We have engaged lawmakers to classify copper theft and sabotage as a serious offence to curb and eliminate the constant sabotage of our network.” — Telecom Namibia Management, November 2023
The company’s April 2026 outage brought fresh urgency to these concerns. CEO Shanapinda specifically flagged misinformation and threats directed at the company during the outage period, warning that intimidation and incitement to harm were illegal. He noted that South African international routes had become prone not only to fibre breaks and power outages, but to vandalism — suggesting coordinated or systematic targeting of critical infrastructure.
The sabotage question extends beyond opportunistic copper theft. Critical infrastructure targeting whether for criminal profit, competitive advantage, or political motivation is a recognised threat in the African telecom landscape. Nigeria’s National Communications Commission documented over 50,000 cases of destruction of fibre optic cables in just five years, with fibre infrastructure vandalism contributing to more than 30% of all reported network outage incidents. Namibia, with a smaller network and a single dominant fixed-line provider, is structurally more vulnerable to such attacks.
Whether Telecom Namibia’s infrastructure attacks represent purely opportunistic criminal activity, competitive sabotage, or something more organised remains under investigation. What is clear is that the company’s response — increased security, police engagement, and legislative lobbying has not yet succeeded in breaking the cycle. Each outage costs millions in repairs, erodes customer trust, and forces the company to deploy scarce capital on restoration rather than expansion.
The combination of financial vulnerability created by the Angola and South Africa investment failures, the erosion of infrastructure through both neglect and vandalism, and the loss of skilled personnel creates an organisation that is systemically weakened and therefore more susceptible to each subsequent attack, technical or otherwise. Whether any of this deterioration was by design, by negligence, or by misfortune is a question that Namibian authorities and the Telecom Namibia board may need to examine with greater rigour than they have to date.
VI. The Road Ahead: Reform, Resilience, or Continued Decline?
Telecom Namibia is not without hope. The company recorded a modest profit in 2021, with return on equity of 6.3%. Broadband subscriptions grew 14% in 2020. Data revenue is rising as Namibians embrace digital services. The OSS/BSS modernisation, fixed-mobile convergence investment, and the N$2.3 billion infrastructure upgrade programme represent a serious attempt at institutional renewal.
But the structural challenges are profound. The company must simultaneously replace ageing infrastructure, complete a complex billing platform migration, rebuild technical talent, defend its network against persistent physical sabotage, and compete against a mobile-first market in which MTC holds 73% of all radio access network sites compared to Telecom Namibia’s 24%.
The lessons of the Angola and South Africa ventures are clear: strategic expansion without adequate risk assessment, market intelligence, and financial buffers is catastrophic. The cash reserves that evaporated into those failed ventures were the same reserves that might have funded timely infrastructure upgrades and billing system modernisation — investments that, had they been made earlier, might have averted some of the crises that followed.
What Telecom Namibia requires now is not simply capital, though capital is urgently needed but a governance framework that ensures strategic decisions are rigorously tested, that human capital is valued as a strategic asset rather than a cost to be cut, that infrastructure investment is continuous rather than sporadic, and that physical sabotage of the national communications network is treated with the seriousness it deserves as an attack on critical national infrastructure.
For a country of Namibia’s size and ambition, reliable telecommunications is not optional. It is the nervous system of economic development, education, healthcare, and governance. Telecom Namibia’s survival and renewal is therefore not merely a corporate matter, it is a national imperative. It is our shared responsibility to restore Telecom Namibia to a strong, service-driven and financially sustainable institution, one that places people at the centre of its mandate. Unlike service providers that prioritise profit over access, Telecom Namibia must reaffirm its role in ensuring that essential services reach all citizens first, while remaining efficient, competitive, and profitable in a balanced and responsible way.
*Lot Ndamanomhata is from Ekoka. This article reflects his views and write entirely in his personal capacity.
