By Oswald Siku Mughongora
The Namibia Natural Resource Consortium (2001), in its contribution to Namibia’s Vision 2030, highlighted the natural resource sector’s vision as follows: Namibia shall develop its natural capital for the benefit of its social, economic, and ecological well-being by adopting strategies that promote the sustainable, equitable, and efficient use of natural resources, maximise Namibia’s comparative advantages, and reduce inappropriate resource use practices.
It is a well-known secret that Namibia is well endowed with natural resources, including wildlife, fisheries, forestry, oil, coal, natural gas, minerals such as diamond, copper, and uranium, and quite recent rare metals such as lithium.
The latter is key to the impending green energy transition. Natural resources are the raw materials for making the products we use daily.
Thus, they play a role in primary production and set the tone for secondary and tertiary production. Every country wishes to have a natural resource base as rich as Namibia.
Namibia has long been considered a leader in natural resource conservation, with 44% of its land protected and the country’s entire coastline protected.
Despite this, a 2021 report by the Namibia Statistics Agency reported that approximately 43% of Namibia’s population lives in poverty (59% live in rural and 25% in urban areas).
A recent report by the World Bank stated that a shocking 1.6 million people live in poverty in Namibia.
From a population of only about 2.6 million, this is indeed very shocking. Namibia’s economic advantage remains in the hands of a relatively small population segment, and significant inequality continues.
Namibia is one of the most unequal countries, with a 59.1 Gini coefficient and very high unemployment rates, partly due to slow job creation and low primary-sector productivity.
The question remains: How can Namibia practically use its plentiful natural capital to achieve socioeconomic benefits and environmental sustainability based on the above-stated strategies? Let us unpack this dilemma.
Namibia must ensure that its abundant natural resources are efficiently utilised to benefit all its citizens (equitable) while not forfeiting the future generation’s chances of deriving those same benefits (sustainability).
Historically, Namibia has adopted policies and approaches to ensure equitable distribution of its natural resources to previously disadvantaged citizens; however, the definition of “previously disadvantaged” has remained unchanged for 32 years and counting after independence.
This has created a segment of “previously disadvantaged and overly advantaged” citizens. Let’s leave this discussion for another day! One such equitable policy is the Namibianisation policy (currently in use in the fishing industry), which the government introduced to help citizens become key players in their economy by diverting ownership of the fisheries’ assets from foreign to local. The extent to which its application has succeeded is up for debate, especially after the fishrot scandal.
However, it is imperative to introduce and re-enforce this policy in all natural resource sectors, but this time implement it using the Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) approach.
CBNRM empowers communities by providing rights over land and natural resources, building skills and capacity, establishing community decision-making bodies, and promoting community advocacy and inclusion in mainstream economic activities.
Although currently based on wildlife and tourism, the CBNRM approach has the potential to provide an umbrella for integrated natural resource planning and management by local communities and institutional models for inclusivity.
To promote inclusivity and long-term socioeconomic livelihood empowerment, host communities of natural resources ought to be equal owners of derived nature-based enterprises through models such as community cooperatives, etc.
If properly merged and implemented, these two have the potential to promote equity and widespread social and economic benefits.
Namibia’s competitive advantage has always been in its abundant natural resource base. To its credit, a series of primary-based industries have been successfully built. However, the same cannot be said about the secondary and tertiary sectors.
Most of Namibia’s extractive industries export raw materials in their rawest and least expensive forms only to buy finished products at much higher prices.
This needs to change. With its proven competitive advantage, Namibia must find a way to turn that competitive advantage into a comparative advantage, build economies of scale, empower local SMEs, and ultimately enhance internal economic activities.
The end? A higher GDP. We have abundant fish. Let us build fish processing plants. Do we have abundant oil? Let us build oil refineries.
Do we have abundant sun and water? Let us build green energy technologies. Do we have foreign investors bidding for any of our natural resources? Let them set up extractive (primary) and even refinery (secondary) technologies here and enforce internal knowledge and technology transfer.
This concept is what De Wet (2000) refers to as backward integration, in which technology from developed foreign countries is imported within local industries and allows for technology transfer into local research institutions and personnel, ultimately building local capacity and know-how.
This should be our win-win situation with foreign investors. In the end, we will be players in the entire value chain involving our natural resources and kill off the dependency syndrome for secondary and tertiary activities.
Institutions of higher learning need to work with industries in this regard.
Our natural resources need to be extracted sustainably and optimally to allow for replenishment (in the case of our renewable resources, such as fish) and extended beneficiation (for non-renewable resources).
This calls for good resource planning and a sound monitoring and evaluation system to allow for optimal utilisation, resource-based monitoring, and benefit sharing and to avoid the “resource curse” that has affected many resource-rich countries.
Oswald Siku Mughongora is a certified renewable energy consultant with an MBA in natural resources management and a postgraduate diploma in monitoring and evaluation.
