By Levy Hamukoto
There is a particular kind of silence that settles in a car at 07:20 on a weekday morning in Windhoek.
Not an angry silence. A resigned one. The radio is on but nobody is listening. Somebody in the next lane is eating breakfast off the dashboard.
A taxi noses in from the left and nobody hoots anymore, because hooting assumes the queue can move.
That traffic queue is the most honest meeting room in Windhoek. Everybody attends. Nobody chose to be there. And every morning it tells us something we keep declining to hear.
We are having the wrong argument
The argument we are having in public is about roads. Whose roads, whose potholes, whose budget, whose fault.
The municipal case is reported on the media and it is not trivial. The city says it needs roughly N$384 million a year simply for routine road maintenance for which, it points out, no revenue is collected from road users through tariffs or levies plus a further N$353 million to repair damage from the 2024/25 rainy season, which affected some 650 streets. It says it receives only 5% to 10% of the road maintenance support it requires from national road funding. It has also conceded, candidly, that the capital spent some 35 years doing surface-level patching rather than proper maintenance.
The national funding side has its own defensible case, and makes it. Both can be true at once.
And while that argument runs, roughly 20,500 vehicles continue to enter the capital every day about 16,000 through the northern corridor, 4,500 through the south and the queue does not move a metre.
Here is what I think we are missing. Even if that argument were settled tomorrow, entirely in the city’s favour, the traffic would not clear.
The city itself has said as much. Its position, stated plainly, is that congestion is a symptom rather than the underlying challenge and that no major city in the world has ever successfully built its way out of congestion simply by expanding roads or upgrading intersections.
That is not a critic speaking. That is the institution that builds the roads.
The actual problem is a shape we have no cheque for Windhoek’s situation is genuinely unusual, and it is worth stating precisely, because most of the commentary gets it backwards.
Car ownership here is relatively low. The overwhelming majority of residents including in the northwestern suburbs where congestion has become most visible, rely on some form of public transport. But there is no modern mass transit system. So that demand is met almost entirely by four- door sedan taxis and ”Okalefas”, the fastest minibus on Windhoek roads: an essential public service, delivered by operators doing necessary work, which by the city’s own account contributes significantly to traffic volumes at peak.
Read that carefully. The congestion is not primarily caused by too many private cars. It is caused by tens of thousands of people who do not own cars being moved, one to four at a time, in vehicles designed to carry a family to the shops.
That is not a road problem. It is an absence where a bus network should be.
And this is where the funding question stops being an excuse and starts being the entire story.
Roads are a capital expense. You budget, you build, you cut the ribbon, you maintain. We know how to fund that imperfectly, contentiously, but the machinery exists. A billion dollars went into the Windhoek–Okahandja dual carriageway. Hundreds of millions more are committed to the Western Bypass, with additional costs now on speed humps and the Rehoboth road.
Public transport is an operating expense. Buses do not merely need to be bought; they need to be run every day, on unprofitable routes, at fares people can actually afford, forever. Every functioning transit system on earth is subsidised in this way. It is not a Namibian failing. It is the nature of the thing.
And Namibia has never established a mechanism to provide that subsidy. Not an inadequate one.
So we have a plan without a payment method. That is why the sustainable urban transport master plan of 2013 did not become a bus network. Not because nobody knew what to do, the technical work has been done repeatedly, competently, and is being done again now in a new integrated transport master plan, modelling how this city will move over the next twenty years. Its preliminary finding is already public: on current trends, without significant improvement in public transport, congestion will worsen drastically as Windhoek grows.
The forecast is not a surprise. It is a warning we commissioned, paid for, and received.
What we count, and what we don’t
Notice which numbers we know by heart.
Between February 2025 and May 2026, the city repaired 85,074 potholes and completed 68,765 square metres of patchwork. That figure is reported diligently. It grows every time it is quoted 67,000 in March, 76,000 in May, 85,000 in June.
Now try to recall the other number. What would it cost, per year, to run a functioning bus network in Windhoek?
You cannot recall it, because it has never been put in front of you.
We count potholes because potholes come with a budget line. The absence of a bus network has no budget line, so it has no number, so it never appears in the argument. And an ask that has never been priced is very easy to refuse and impossible to be held to.
That is the gap. Not vision. Not analysis. Not willingness. A funding framework and a number attached to it, in public, that somebody has to answer for.
To be fair, that conversation has finally started: the city says it has spent the past year engaging the responsible ministries to build consensus on a sustainable funding framework for urban public transport. Good. It should have started in 2013 and been resolved then. It cannot take another thirteen years, because the modelling tells us exactly what the waiting costs.
The point Congestion is a symptom. So, I would argue, is the blame.
Both are what a system produces when the real question has no home. And the real question is not who owes whom money for potholes. It is this: who pays to move a person who does not own a car, and by what mechanism, starting when?
Until that question has an answer with a rand figure and a name against it, we are not debating transport strategy. We are just taking turns explaining the queue.
Roads matter. They are necessary and they will remain necessary, and the argument about maintaining them is a legitimate argument worth having.
But we will not build our way out of this. The city has said so itself. The future of this capital will not be decided by how many roads we build. It will be decided by whether we ever work out how to pay for the alternative.
*Levy Hamukoto is a Data Scientist, Analyst and Strategist. The views expressed are his own.
