A retrospective — and a warning that must be heeded now
Stanley Nick Katzao
On 6 July 2001, this newspaper published an analysis I wrote as a final-year MBA student titled ‘Crisis Heroism & Shifting the Burden, a Focus on Air Namibia’.
Air Namibia had just run up what was then a shocking N$350 million in debt following a major management reshuffle, and the government was preparing the first of what would become many multimillion-dollar rescue packages.
I argued, using a simple systems-thinking model, that the airline was treating symptoms while leaving the disease untouched, and that unless it changed course, the debt would keep rising, the crises would keep recurring, and the state’s capacity to keep bailing it out would eventually run out.
Twenty-five years later, with Air Namibia liquidated and its successor, Namibia Air, now taking shape, it is worth asking plainly: was that warning right, and is anyone listening to it now?
The pattern I described in 2001 has a name in systems theory: ‘shifting the burden’. An organisation in crisis has two options. It can fix the symptom — replace the leadership, restructure the balance sheet, declare victory — and enjoy a quick, visible win.
Or it can fix the underlying problem: the culture, the skills, the leadership agility, the business model itself. The trouble is that the quick fix is seductive. It produces a hero, it produces headlines, and it buys time.
But every time an organisation chooses the quick fix over the hard fix, it gets a little more dependent on quick fixes, and a little less capable of ever doing the hard work.
I predicted that Air Namibia would keep quick-fixing, that its debt would keep rising in fits and starts, and that eventually the country’s patience — and its money — would run out.
There is a leadership dimension to this story too. Leadership scholars describe a spectrum of leadership maturity: at one end, reactive, heroic styles that parachute in to fix a visible symptom and take a bow; at the other, what is often called leadership agility — the capacity to sense weak signals early, sit with ambiguity long enough to understand a problem properly, and build new structures collaboratively rather than simply defend old ones.
What I called ‘crisis heroism’ in 2001 is a textbook case of the reactive end of that spectrum: a new chief executive parachuted in to be seen fixing things, applauded for a short-term win, then quietly replaced once the underlying numbers caught up with the airline again.
Namibia Air will only break this cycle if the leaders running it sit closer to the agile end of that spectrum: comfortable saying no to political pressure, willing to hold an uncomfortable question open until it is properly resolved, and content to be judged on quiet structural discipline rather than a dramatic turnaround story.
When the axe finally fell in February 2021, the airline’s liabilities stood at close to N$5.4 billion against barely N$1 billion in assets, whilst the cumulative bailout bill by the time of liquidation was somewhere between N$8 billion and N$9 billion by government’s own figures, and the finance minister of the day said plainly that Air Namibia had been ‘a flawed business model since the beginning’, with fifteen of its nineteen routes unprofitable.
In 2001, I asked whether Air Namibia was in the right business, whether it had the right people, and whether the flag and national pride were being used to shut down conversations the country badly needed to have.
Those questions went unanswered for two decades. In the end, the market and the treasury answered them for us.
There is a business dimension to this story as well. Twenty-five years of bailouts never once forced Air Namibia through what strategists call business model innovation — a genuine redesign of what it does, who it serves, what it charges and how its costs are structured, rather than a fresh coat of paint on the same balance sheet.
Each rescue package refinanced the same value proposition and the same loss-making routes instead of reinventing them.
Real business model innovation would have meant asking, rigorously and early, which routes deserve to exist, what a national carrier is actually for, and how ownership and capital should be structured to reward efficiency rather than shield it from consequences.
That work was never done for Air Namibia. It cannot be skipped again for Namibia Air.
Now we are doing this again. Cabinet approved the name ‘Namibia Air (Pty) Ltd’ in November 2025: a fully state-owned entity for now, with a public-private partnership model still under negotiation, an interim board in place, and a launch targeted for beginning of December 2026.
Officials have been admirably clear that this is meant to be a clean break rather than a resurrection of the old carrier. Works and Transport Minister Veikko Nekundi has said plainly: ‘We are not reviving Air Namibia. We are reviving a national airline.’
I want to believe that. But good intentions were never the problem the last time either. The problem was always structure — and right now, the structural questions that sank the last airline are once again sitting unanswered at the design table.
Namibia Air is starting out fully state-owned while a private partner is still being sought. That is precisely the ownership question I called an ‘undiscussable’ in 2001 — and this time we have the chance to resolve it before the first crisis, not after the tenth.
Opposition voices have already called the new airline a ‘gamble’ with taxpayer funds, and local reporting has already flagged concerns about the pace and transparency of the process, months before a single aircraft has flown a single route.
In shifting-the-burden terms, those are not distractions. They are exactly the early warning signs worth taking seriously, precisely because they are appearing this early.
This is not a call for caution at some point down the line. It is an imperative for right now, while Namibia Air is still lines on a business plan and not yet an aircraft in the air. Four things must happen before a single ticket is sold, not after the first crisis forces them.
First, settle the ownership question now, while it is still cheap to settle. A carrier that launches fully state-owned while still hunting for a private partner is repeating, almost word for word, the ‘undiscussable’ I flagged in 2001. It must be resolved at the design table, not deferred to the next crisis.
Second, write the guardrails into law and governance before launch: a board empowered to say no to a minister, a binding and public cap on state guarantees, and an independent route-profitability review built into the business model from day one — not bolted on once the losses start.
Third, refuse to celebrate an early good headline as proof of success. Judge Namibia Air only on route-level profitability, service quality and genuine commercial discipline, sustained over years — not on how much better the first annual report looks than Air Namibia’s last one.
Fourth, do not let the flag and national pride do the job a business plan is supposed to do. If a route cannot be justified commercially, sentiment must not be allowed to keep it flying at public expense.
The first two of these are, at heart, business model innovation decisions — redesigning who owns the airline and how its economics work.
The last two demand exactly the kind of leadership agility that crisis heroism has always lacked — the discipline to resist an early win and stay accountable to the harder, longer measure of success.
In 2001, only half in jest, I suggested that absent real reform, Namibia’s only remaining option was a national day of prayer for both Air Namibia and Namibian football.
Twenty-five years and roughly N$8 billion later, that line reads less like a joke and more like a warning that went unheeded. Namibia Air has one advantage its predecessor never had: it gets to read this obituary before it is written.
That advantage expires the moment the first aircraft takes off. Acting on these four imperatives before then is not optional caution — it is the only thing standing between Namibia Air and a repeat performance.
Stanley Nick Katzao is a business leader and MBA candidate in Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Cumbria, researching business model innovation and leadership agility in the context of Namibia’s aviation sector. He authored the original 2001 analysis of Air Namibia referenced in this piece.
