Opinions

Malcolm Kambanzera Many organisations have strategic plans. Far fewer have strategies. Every few years, boards and management teams retreat to conference rooms, revisit their vision and mission, conduct a SWOT analysis, formulate strategic objectives and eventually produce an “impressive document” setting out where the organisation intends to be over the next three to five years. The document is approved. It is presented to employees. Sometimes it is professionally designed, printed and displayed prominently. Then ordinary business resumes. This is where one of the most persistent misconceptions in organisational management begins: the assumption that having a strategic plan means that an…

Jeronimo Kateya This article examines educational decolonisation by contrasting Kwame Nkrumah's Ubuntu-centred communal ontology with René Descartes' individualistic Cogito ergo sum. The article argues that Western-rooted Cartesian rationalism embedded in formal African education fuels cultural homogenisation and erodes indigenous African identity. Drawing on contemporary African decolonial scholarship, the paper advocates embedding Ubuntu-based communal epistemologies into curricula, using China's integration of Confucian values as a comparative model.  Centering communal interdependence can revitalise African intangible cultural heritage and build context-relevant educational practice. Colonial epistemic legacies continue to shape African schooling, reproducing Western-centric individualism at the expense of indigenous worldviews (Mbembe, 2016).  African…

Paul T. Shipale (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar) Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant technological concept reserved for Silicon Valley laboratories. It is rapidly entering workplaces, classrooms, businesses and public institutions, forcing countries to confront a question that goes far beyond technology. In that case what must human beings become better at when machines become capable of doing more of what humans once did? For Namibia, this is not an abstract question. It is a developmental question. Mee Honorable Emma (Teofelus) , the one I saw with others clocking it. Let’s talk.  The proposed Human Advantage National…

Paul T. Shipale (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar) The reported exclusion of the US ambassador from Namibia’s National Fisheries Indaba should not be reduced to a diplomatic incident. It should provoke a deeper conversation about sovereignty, protocol and who has the right to participate in Namibia’s national decision making. There are moments when a seemingly ordinary incident reveals a much larger question about the character of a nation. The report by New Era that US ambassador to Namibia John Giordano was denied entry to the Walvis Bay Town Hall, where President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was attending the National Fisheries…

Five piles of buried value still waiting to be mined Stanley Nick Katzao Madam President, at the National Fisheries Indaba this week, you shared a powerful lesson from Namibia’s mining sector. You noted that a surprising share of a mine's true wealth is not found in the ore shipped out, but in the heaps left behind. These dumps and tailings, once abandoned as waste, can yield immense value upon a careful second pass. You then asked the delegates a fair question: Does our fishing industry have heaps too? It does, Madam President. I have identified five of them, and I…

Staff Writer  Nedbank Insurance Namibia has launched MyCover Funeral, a funeral insurance product that allows clients to cover up to 29 people under one policy, including extended family members and domestic workers. The product is the first to be introduced through a new policy administration platform developed as part of a business transformation programme that began in 2024.  The launch also marks the adoption of Nedbank Insurance Namibia as the insurance business’s new trading name. Nedbank Insurance Namibia head of client solutions, Allan Johnson, said MyCover Funeral was introduced in response to the need for insurance that better reflects the…

Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro “Pro-poor economic vision” - enters Reverend Paul Isak last Friday in his article as guest of the editor of an English daily newspaper. Thereby, he adds his name to the long list of what most, if not all, may ultimately be seen as apologists for the capitalist system in Namibia. Various terms, descriptions, political and economic coinages have been used to describe what is fundamentally one and the same problem continuing to bedevil Namibia since independence: increasing inequality and the attendant, unabated impoverishment of a majority, if not most, of the Namibian population. This is a situation that,…

Olavi Hangula and Naftal Akweenda The conversation around Namibia's energy sector is changing. The question is no longer whether the opportunity exists, but whether businesses are preparing now to participate when it arrives. For the past few years, Namibia's energy story has been dominated by discovery. Exploration results in the Orange Basin put the country firmly on the global energy map and brought with them a wave of interest from operators, investors and service providers. The next milestones are equally well known: Final Investment Decisions, development and, eventually, first oil. At the Namibia Oil and Gas Conference 2026, however, the…