By Dr Penny Tuna Magdalena
Namibia has 3,022,401 people.
That number should sit at the centre of every conversation we have about development.
We are discussing oil, green hydrogen, uranium, phosphate, logistics, beneficiation and industrialisation. Yet our economy grew by only 1.7% in 2025. The Bank of Namibia expects 2.6% growth in 2026. The IMF expects 2.1%.
More importantly, the Bank of Namibia has already said what many households experience every day: economic growth has not translated proportionately into employment.
That is the signal.
The rest is noise.
Namibia does not lack assets. We struggle to make enough of those assets work for Namibians.
We have seen this before.
Uranium helped support growth when diamonds weakened in 2025. Yet the IMF describes uranium production as having limited linkages with the rest of the economy.
Think about that.
A country can produce one of the world’s most strategically important minerals, export it
successfully and still struggle to spread enough of that activity through the wider economy.
That is why the oil conversation must become more sophisticated than how many barrels lie offshore.
Oil and gas exploration-related imports alone were equivalent to about 5.3% of GDP in 2025.
Namibia’s current account deficit stood at 13.1% of GDP.
The oil economy has therefore already started affecting our economy before commercial production has begun.
Someone is supplying the vessels.
Someone is providing engineering.
Someone is analysing geological data.
Someone is insuring equipment.
Someone is providing legal services.
Someone is moving people.
Someone is financing operations.
Someone is learning.
The question is how many of those someones are Namibian, and how many more will be
Namibian five years from now.
Because finding oil and building an oil economy are two different things.
The same question should follow every major investment:
What stays behind?
When the foreign contractor leaves, who knows how?
When the mine eventually closes, what businesses remain?
When the consultant finishes the assignment, can the institution continue without another consultant?
When an experienced official retires after thirty years, does thirty years of knowledge remain in the institution?
When billions enter an industry, do Namibian suppliers, engineers, managers and entrepreneurs become more capable?
If not, we may have recorded investment without sufficiently building capacity.
The problem also exists inside our institutions.
The IMF estimates central government personnel expenditure at 13.4% of GDP in FY2025/26. It simultaneously warns that Namibia faces skills mismatches and says civil-service reform should better align staff numbers, skills and deployment.
That distinction matters.
Having people employed is not the same as using what people know.
We appoint experts to boards, commissions and committees and sometimes barely use their expertise. We recruit qualified people into institutions and bury them beneath structures that reward compliance more than initiative. We complain about shortages of skills while existing skills sit underused.
Worse, sometimes knowledge itself becomes power.
One person understands the process. One person controls the relationship. One person knows where the document is. One person knows how the system works.
Everyone must come through them.
It feels like importance.
It is actually institutional weakness.
If an institution cannot function when one person leaves, it never had institutional capacity. It had a dependency.
For a country of three million people, that is expensive.
So is division.
We divide an already small pool of people by politics, region, tribe, institution, profession, faction and personality. We ask who appointed someone before asking what they can contribute. We protect territories while opportunities move faster than our institutions.
Our population may be three million.
Our usable talent pool becomes whatever remains after we finish excluding one another.
This is why I keep saying Namibia is too few to be divided. It is not a plea for everyone to like one another. It is arithmetic.
And this month, that arithmetic became painfully personal.
I lost Dr Simon “Dollar” Haikela Shanyengana.
Simon was a geologist, mining engineer, entrepreneur and Mandarin speaker. But those titles still miss what made him valuable.
Simon taught me to translate worlds.
When I arrived in China, he did not encourage me to recreate Namibia around myself. Go out, he insisted. Learn the language. Meet people from different countries. Understand how they think.
Understand their systems. Understand where they come from. Take theory and learn how it works in practice.
He did not protect knowledge to remain important.
He made other people more capable.
His death made one national phrase suddenly very personal to me: capacity loss.
Because who do I call now?
Not for information. Google has information.
Who do I call for judgement? For someone who understands several worlds at once and can see where the pieces connect?
Small countries feel those losses differently.
This Heroes’ Day, that question follows me for another reason.
My grandfather, Immanuel Ndemulungila Nathaniel Maxuilili, is being reburied at Heroes’ Acre.
His generation faced scarcity of another kind. They did not have a sovereign state, today’s institutions or the economic opportunities we now debate. Yet they organised people, transferred political knowledge, built networks and eventually helped deliver a country to the generation that followed.
We inherited the Republic.
What stays behind from us?
Namibia’s next economic chapter will not be determined simply by what lies beneath our soil or offshore.
The IMF says growth remains insufficient to meaningfully reduce unemployment, inequality and poverty. It identifies skills mismatches, regulatory bottlenecks and limited diversification among the constraints.
The Bank of Namibia says growth has not translated proportionately into jobs.
Those are warnings.
Oil will not fix a country that does not learn.
Uranium cannot substitute for capability.
A port cannot industrialise us by itself.
Foreign investment cannot transfer knowledge we make no deliberate effort to absorb.
And no development plan can overcome institutions that make capable people unusable to one another.
The next struggle is not over whether Namibia has opportunity.
It is over whether we know what to do with it.
We are too few to hoard knowledge.
Too few to waste talent.
Too few to make ourselves indispensable instead of making our institutions stronger.
Too few to spend another generation fighting over who controls the room while the world moves outside it.
Our heroes fought for political freedom.
Our responsibility is not to keep fighting one another over the inheritance.
It is to build with it.
Because eventually the oil will run out. People will retire. Leaders will leave. And all of us will die.
The economic question is much simpler:
What will Namibia know how to do after we are gone?
*Dr Penny Tuna Magdalena Uukunde is a Regional Development Economist and China Africa Strategist. The views expressed are her own.
