Opinions

The question for Namibia is whether a country with a small economy, high unemployment, limited industrialisation and an urgent need to create opportunities for young people should see AI primarily as a threat or as an extraordinary opportunity. Recent research by PwC, based on more than one billion online job advertisements across six continents, provides an important corrective to the fear that AI simply means mass unemployment. Its findings suggest something more complicated: AI is not merely eliminating jobs. It is segmenting and reshaping them. Some jobs are becoming professionalised. Routine processes are increasingly handled by machines, leaving humans with…

AWIE THOMPSON Agriculture has always demanded resilience. But there are moments when that word carries considerably more weight than usual. For livestock farmers affected by the current Foot-and-Mouth Disease situation, this is one of those moments. Movement restrictions and uncertainty around market access have very real consequences for farming operations, cash flow and livelihoods. Behind every affected farming business are families, employees and communities whose incomes are connected to agriculture. Having spent seven years in primary agriculture, farming cattle and crops and working in agro-processing, I understand that these pressures cannot simply be reduced to numbers on a balance sheet.…

Kae Matundu Tjiparuro “Revolutions are made not by the deputies in parliament, but by the masses,” wrote French Marxist Louis Althusser in his rendition of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Yours Truly Ideologically cannot but muse what the honourable members of our august houses, that is the National Assembly (NA) and the National Council (NC), composing Namibia's parliament, would say and have to say about this excerpt and posit from Althusser. In view of the fact that, albeit him, parliament cannot but be just another apparatus of the state. In fact, there is and can be no denial that parliament…

Stanley Nick Katzao When United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres delivered his final address to the General Assembly, he offered a sobering truth: “The United Nations exists because power requires rules—and humanity needs a place where power answers to principle.” It was a profound appeal for multilateral sanity in an era fractured by unilateral aggression. Yet, for the nations of Southern Africa, and particularly Namibia, this statement diagnoses a historic wound. For decades, the horseshoe chamber of the UN Security Council (UNSC) has served as the exact antithesis of Guterres’s vision: a place where principle has repeatedly yielded to the interests…

Dylan Mukoroli After years of subdued growth, slowing to around 1.7% in 2025 amid diamond sector weakness and lingering drought effects; the administration under H.E Dr. Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah is most determined to hit Ctrl + Alt + Delete on structural bottlenecks and unlock growth opportunities. The goal is not incremental tinkering but a decisive and much needed restart. What is further encouraging is seeing the unlocking of private-sector dynamism in the works of the administration, and building genuine resilience. Once the honeymoon phase is over and things go quiet, this is where the real work starts.  Oil and gas discoveries,…

Paul T. Shipale (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar) Let us think legally or properly with Lazarino Poulson. There are legal reflections that go beyond law because they force us to look at politics with greater precision.  Lazarino Poulson’s distinction between republic and legislature offers precisely such an opportunity to bring that reasoning into the Namibian context and ask whether what we so often call a “new era” is truly a new era or simply a new cycle within the same republic. The question may appear semantic. But it is not, it is constitutional, political and, above all, it…

Sem Billy David A government that remembers its people only when elections approach is not governing. It is managing an image. One year or few months to elections, the familiar machinery of electioneering is already beginning to move. The speeches return. The convoys are prepared. The promises are polished. The political dust shoes are waiting to be disturbed. Namibians know this cycle too well. We are told that it is governance, but much of it is not governance at all. It is campaigning disguised as public service, political theatre presented as leadership, and temporary compassion performed for permanent votes. Frantz…

Matheus Hangula Credit must be given where it is due. It is very rare to hear the media fraternity in Namibia being praised for the role it plays; instead, people tend to criticise it. The media deserves a round of applause because they have been giving space and making sure that the people are kept updated on time without delay. It was through the media that President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah received the news about the 16-year-old from Omutundungu village who drowned baby twins in a pond, and as a result, he was conferred with a heroism medal class three. This tells…

Sakaria Johannes There was a time in our communities when a boy who complained about hardship, heartbreak or responsibility would be told: “I didimika owulumenhu” (loosely translated as “Try to be strong, you are a man.”) That expression captured an old understanding of masculinity: a man must endure, provide, protect and remain strong, often without asking for support. But Namibia has changed. We now speak loudly and rightly about gender equality, women's empowerment, equal opportunities and the protection of women's rights.  Yet an important question remains: where does the Namibian man fit into this evolving understanding of equality? The recent…

There is a question that the current foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak should force every Namibian entrepreneur to ask: Are we genuinely ready for the next crisis that will hit our economy? Not the crisis we can see coming. Not the crisis for which government issues a warning and gives us time to prepare. I mean the crisis that arrives suddenly, disrupts established assumptions and exposes how vulnerable our businesses really are. We have been here before. COVID-19 should have been our great national lesson in economic resilience. It demonstrated with brutal clarity how quickly businesses can move from profitable to…