Namibia says it wants entrepreneurs. It wants small businesses to grow, employ young people, innovate and contribute to an economy desperately in need of new opportunities.
But how are entrepreneurs supposed to grow when the very institutions with the resources to support them become their competitors?
There is a troubling practice that Namibia needs to confront: small businesses approach large corporates, state-owned enterprises and public institutions with ideas, concepts and proposals seeking partnerships, funding or commercial support.
Instead of receiving support, some later watch similar ideas emerge from the very institutions they approached, sometimes without acknowledgement, compensation or involvement.
That is not entrepreneurship development. It is entrepreneurship destruction.
President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah has herself cautioned state-owned and public enterprises against taking project ideas from smaller innovators, while stressing that opportunities should be awarded on merit and that local entrepreneurs deserve fair treatment.
The warning speaks to a much bigger problem.
Namibia cannot constantly tell young people to become entrepreneurs because formal employment opportunities are limited, while simultaneously allowing powerful institutions to suffocate the businesses they are being encouraged to build.
Small businesses do not have unlimited capital. They do not have large legal departments, procurement teams or balance sheets capable of absorbing losses. Often, their greatest asset is the idea they have spent months or years developing.
When that idea is presented to a large organisation in good faith, the entrepreneur is looking for a partner, not creating a blueprint for someone else to copy.
Corporates should understand that supporting SMEs is not charity.
A N$50,000 or N$100,000 contract might barely register on the expenditure line of a major corporation, but for a small business it can pay salaries, finance expansion, purchase equipment and potentially create another job.
That is how economies grow.
Corporate Namibia must therefore decide what role it wants to play. Is it going to nurture the next generation of Namibian businesses, or use its financial muscle and market dominance to crowd them out before they have had an opportunity to establish themselves?
There is also a question of trust. Why should an entrepreneur approach a large company with an innovative proposal if doing so creates the risk that the concept will simply be taken in-house?
Eventually, entrepreneurs stop sharing ideas. Innovation retreats. Collaboration disappears.
Namibia already has a small private sector and a serious unemployment challenge. We cannot afford an environment where entrepreneurship is celebrated from conference podiums but undermined in corporate boardrooms.
Big businesses should be opening doors for smaller ones, not closing them.
If Namibia genuinely wants SMEs to grow, create employment and become tomorrow’s major companies, then protecting and supporting their ideas must become part of how we do business.
You cannot ask people to innovate and then punish them for having good ideas.
* 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.
