By Nghuulili Martin Nambala
TotalEnergies is moving towards a final investment decision on Venus in the Orange Basin. The project sits in the US$15–20 billion range, with first oil still targeted around 2029–2030.
Construction alone is expected to generate roughly 5,000 jobs and production another 7,000. More than US$2 billion has already been spent inside Namibia.
The opportunity is real. The danger is that we treat it as someone else’s industry.
Namibia now faces a clear choice. We can follow the path taken by Norway, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and others, countries that treated oil and gas as a foundation for national capability or we can repeat the pattern of Nigeria, Angola and others where the resource enriched a narrow circle while the broader economy remained an enclave.
The difference was never geology. It was ownership of skills, suppliers and decision-making power.
Norway built institutions, forced technology transfer and insisted on local participation from the start. Qatar and Saudi Arabia used aggressive localisation targets, national champions and deliberate skills programmes so that citizens moved from employees to owners of capability.
Nigeria and Angola passed local-content laws yet struggled with weak enforcement, skills gaps that never closed, and a persistent dependence on foreign expertise.
The result: limited backward linkages, high youth unemployment and oil that never translated into broad prosperity.
Namibia’s numbers show which road we are currently on. The NIPDB–ILO Energy Sector Skills Strategy found the country holds only about 45 percent of the skills the oil and gas sector will need.
Green hydrogen faces an even steeper shortfall of up to 130,000 skilled workers by 2040, according to NUST. Vocational gaps in coded welding, offshore safety and specialised services remain acute.
If we cannot supply the mid-level technicians, welders, electricians and instrument specialists that the industry requires in volume, operators will import them.
Once imported skills become the default, they rarely leave.
Youth must sit at the centre of the alternative. Unemployment among young Namibians remains stubbornly high. Training for jobs is necessary but not sufficient.
We need practical routes to youth ownership.
Several workable options already exist or can be scaled. Community and youth equity stakes — the 10 percent community shareholding model used at the Daures Green Hydrogen Village should become standard in major projects.
Preferential procurement and access to the National Youth Development Fund can help young people form supplier companies in catering, fabrication, logistics, environmental monitoring and marine services.
Apprenticeship contracts should include clear pathways from trainee to equity holder or business owner, not just employment.
Local-content rules can require a measurable share of contracts to go to youth-owned or youth-majority enterprises, backed by mentorship and performance monitoring rather than paper compliance.
Petrofund and similar funds can expand from scholarships into seed capital and business-skills modules so that a trained welder or technician leaves with both a certificate and a company registration.
Government has taken steps: subsidised tertiary funding, Petrofund’s N$115 million investment in 438 Namibians, the Ignite GH2 programme, and the Youth for Green Hydrogen scholarships.
Private operators are beginning supplier-development work. These efforts matter, but they remain too small and too focused on employment rather than ownership.
The window is short. Final investment decisions and the construction phase will lock in supplier relationships and training pipelines for years. If young Namibians only enter the conversation when production starts, they will already be late.
The resource belongs to Namibians. Whether the skills, the companies and the lasting prosperity also belong to them depends on the choices made in the next three years.
We can build national capacity the way Norway, Qatar and Saudi Arabia did, or we can watch the value flow out the way others did. The difference will be measured in who owns the future and we must learn from those who failed, or join them.
*Nghuulili Martin Nambala is a multidisciplinary student at NUST, Triumphant College and NIT, and co-founder of Pelo Foods CC. His research focuses on financial innovation, SME policy and inclusive growth, with recent work on skills and ownership models for Namibia’s oil, gas and green hydrogen economy. Contact: nambalamg@gmail.com
