An attempt at making sense of the world we now live in, and what it asks of Namibia.
By Vasco Victor
A world that has quietly changed shape
Something profound has happened to the world, and most Namibians have not yet been told plainly what it is.
For seventy years the international system revolved around one dominant power, the United States, and one dominant currency, the US dollar. That order is changing. We have moved from a unipolar world into a multipolar one, a world where no single country is in charge and several large powers jostle for regional dominance.
The scholar John Mearsheimer calls this kind of system ‘anarchic’: not chaotic, simply without a referee. Every great power now competes, rationally, for hegemony in its neighbourhood. This is the arena Namibia plays in, whether we acknowledge it or not.
The financial side of the shift is called de-dollarisation. After the Second World War, oil-producing countries agreed to price oil only in dollars; in exchange, the United States protected global shipping lanes and provided military protection to these oil producing nations.
The French finance minister at the time Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called America’s resulting advantage le privilège exorbitant, because it allowed Washington to effectively print money and receive real goods in return.
That bargain has not so much been broken as quietly eroded, and the erosion has accelerated the process the world now calls de-dollarisation. You can see the response most clearly in the vaults of central banks, which have been rotating out of US Treasuries and into gold at a pace unmatched in modern history.
Two pressures, in particular, have done the work. First, the U.S. froze and threatened to seize foreign sovereign assets. Russia’s, most visibly telling every other country that dollar reserves are no longer politically safe.
Second, in the recent U.S. Iran conflict, America proved that in the age of cheap drones and missiles it cannot keep the Strait of Hormuz open. Security in exchange for dollar use has been quietly cancelled on both sides.
The fractures are visible in the politics too: the UAE’s drift away from OPEC+ discipline, and its quiet conversations about dismantling the Dubai shadow-banking network that kept Iranian crude moving through every round of sanctions, both signal a Gulf beginning to hedge its bets between Washington, Beijing, and itself.
This is what economists mean by Triffin’s dilemma: the country whose currency the world uses must run permanent trade deficits to supply it, and over time the debt mountain becomes unsustainable.
Every reserve currency in history, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, has eventually lost the role, on average after about eighty years. The dollar is now in year eighty-one. The lesson is not anti-American; it is that we live at the tail end of a debt supercycle, and tail ends are turbulent.
Rome did not fall to a foreign army. It fell to internal decay, elites detached from ordinary life, rising inequality, currency debasement, political paralysis. Nations that read such warnings early do better than nations that don’t.
The war, the strait, and the price of a barrel
The Iran war did not remove oil from the market. It did something more consequential: it handed Tehran functional control over the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil must pass.
The status quo has been restructured, not merely disrupted. And here, engineering matters more than headlines.
It is a very specific kind of oil that has been put at risk. Crude is not a uniform commodity; it is a spectrum, measured by API gravity. Iranian Light runs at 33 to 36 degrees API, which global refiners regard as the ‘sweet spot’: light enough to yield high fractions of petrol and diesel, but heavy enough to give complex refineries the middle distillates they were built to process.
Venezuelan Merey at 16 degrees is too heavy, requiring expensive coking units and desulphurisation trains. American shale at 39 to 40 degrees is too light for most European and Asian refineries to run without blending.
The Strait of Hormuz does not just carry barrels; it carries the specific molecular grade the world’s refineries were designed to consume. Close it, or even threaten to close it, and every refinery on earth runs less efficiently on whatever it can find as a substitute.
This is why markets are giving such strange signals. A useful distinction, drawn by analysts who track physical barrels rather than financial ones, is between a deficit and a shortage. We are currently in a global deficit where demand exceeds supply, and we are drawing down on inventories. We are not yet in shortage.
If the current deficit persists, inventories run out, prices go non-linear, and we slide into recession or worse. Diesel, the lifeblood of trucking, mining, and agriculture is the pinch point, and almost every commodity is ultimately, in the old trading phrase, ‘nothing other than dirt and diesel.’ Meanwhile the long-dated oil price sits in the high seventies per barrel, as if everything will return to normal.
The spread between today’s price and the futures curve is the widest it has been in modern history, this is the market’s way of admitting it does not know how to price what is coming.
Meanwhile, the equity market keeps printing all-time highs, the S&P 500 hit another record only recently, but the bond market is telling a different story.
Every time the US ten-year yield drifts above the 4.4 to 4.5 per cent range, the White House pivots toward de-escalation, because at those levels rising rates blow a hole through the federal budget. Equity investors are behaving as though nothing is wrong; the bond market is flashing red. One of them is wrong, and history suggests it is rarely the bond market.
Namibia’s window: The right barrel at the right moment
This is where Namibia enters the picture, and where most of our national conversation is still relatively surface-level. The Orange Basin discoveries are not ordinary. TotalEnergies’ Venus field is estimated at around three billion recoverable barrels.
The Mopane complex, also Total-operated with Galp, is closer to ten billion. Shell has returned to PEL 39 with the Deepsea Mira rig, and onshore tests at Kavango West add further optionality.
Final Investment Decision on Venus is targeted for mid-to-late 2026, with first oil through floating production vessels by 2029–2030. Independent analysts project Namibia could become Africa’s fifth-largest oil producer by 2035.
Yes, these are deep-water wells in some of the most technically demanding waters on the planet. That Total has drilled them successfully is itself remarkable, and informative. But the size of the resource is only half the story.
The other half is quality. Early indications place the Orange Basin crudes in the light, sweet range that global refineries are built to run on. In a world where Iranian Light has been affected and the refining complex is hunting for replacement molecules, that is not a small thing.
It is leverage. Add to that our geography a deep-water Atlantic port at Walvis Bay, far from any contested shipping lane, with direct sea access to Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and we are sitting on a combination of advantages no other African petroleum province currently offers.
And yet reporting suggests government is moving slowly on permits and final agreements. There may be good reasons for the caution.
But Namibians should at least be able to ask: do our negotiators understand what we hold? Are we capturing fair value, or leaving it on the table? And, in time, whether some portion of those barrels might be worth more to us refined at home than shipped out raw, a conversation worth having, quietly and seriously, rather than dismissing.
The second wave: AI, energy, and the minerals beneath our feet
If oil is the story of the next five years, critical minerals and energy are the story of the next twenty. The artificial intelligence revolution is, at root, a physical phenomenon. Every data centre needs vast quantities of electricity.
Every chip is wired in copper. Every grid that carries the electrons to those chips is built on uranium, lithium, copper and rare earths.
The hyperscalers, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon are spending as if AI compute can grow without limit, but a point that physical-asset investors keep making, and that the equity market keeps ignoring, is that the single largest input to AI compute is energy. You cannot have infinite compute on a finite grid.
Namibia is the world’s second largest producer of uranium. We have world-class solar irradiation some of the best on earth for green hydrogen.
The promising Koryx Copper project at Haib, in the south, sits in a global copper market already in structural deficit. We have rare earth prospects and the geological architecture to host much more.
In a world where every gigawatt of AI compute requires real metal in real mines, the question is whether we treat our minerals as products to be dug up and shipped out, or as the foundation of an industrial strategy. The same question, in fact, that applies to our oil.
What this asks of us
I write this as someone trained in petroleum engineering and in finance, and I want to be candid: the world is harder to read now than at any point in my professional life. The dollar architecture is fraying. Oil may go far higher than the futures curve admits. Equities and bonds are telling opposite stories.
AI is consuming more energy than anyone is honestly pricing in. And in the middle of all this, by an extraordinary stroke of geological ‘luck’, Namibia has been handed a portfolio of resources, light sweet crude, uranium, copper, sun, that the rest of the world urgently needs.
None of this guarantees prosperity. Resource wealth without understanding has, more often than not, produced the opposite outcome on this continent.
The first thing we owe ourselves is to learn about API gravity, about Triffin’s dilemma, about how Norway built its sovereign wealth fund and how Indonesia, more recently, forced the world’s battery and stainless-steel industries onto its own soil by banning the export of raw nickel ore. The second is to refuse smallness. For the first time in our history, Namibia sits at the centre of multiple commodity cycles at once, and the world knows it even when we forget.
Our task, plainly stated, is to understand the leverage we hold, negotiate it intelligently, and convert it into the country our children deserve to inherit. The window is open. It will not stay open forever. But while it does, there is genuine reason for pride and for the steady, sober, well prepared confidence of a nation that has finally been invited to the table.
*Vasco Victor is an Investment Analyst at Sisedi Investment Group. Trained in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and in Finance and Management, his work sits at the intersection of geopolitics, energy and critical minerals, with a particular focus on the structural nuances of the commodity industry.
