President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah has acknowledged shortcomings in the government’s communication of its petroleum development plans, saying Namibians need better access to information to understand what is being planned and participate meaningfully in the country’s emerging oil and gas industry.
Speaking at a town hall meeting in Swakopmund on 6 November 2026, Nandi-Ndaitwah said government institutions were not doing enough to explain their activities to the public, leaving citizens without the information needed to contribute to national development discussions.
The President, who was accompanied by senior government officials and advisers, said she had brought the head of the Upstream Petroleum Unit in the Presidency to the meeting to help residents understand developments in the sector.
“You might want to know more about the petroleum, what we are planning and all these things,” she said.
“And then the significance, the problem we have is with communication. We don’t communicate what we are doing in order to educate one another.”
Nandi-Ndaitwah said citizens should know what the Presidency was doing so they could follow government programmes, raise concerns and make suggestions about areas requiring improvement.
She also introduced an official responsible for communicating the Presidency’s activities, saying the public needed to be informed about government decisions and programmes.
The President argued that meaningful public participation depended on people having sufficient information about government activities.
“Make your inputs. Tell your president what should be done, where she did well, where she should improve. But unless you know you will not be able to do that isn’t,” she said.
Her remarks were followed later in the meeting by concerns from a young professional who questioned whether information about petroleum-sector training and capacity-building opportunities was reaching all eligible Namibians.
The participant, identified as Frida, said opportunities being communicated through the petroleum authorities were not always reaching the people who could benefit from them, particularly young professionals seeking to enter the industry.
She asked what mechanisms could be introduced to ensure that information about training programmes and opportunities was distributed more widely.
Responding to the concern, Upstream Petroleum Unit head Cornelia Shilunga explained that the government had changed the way petroleum scholarships were advertised.
She said Petrofund scholarships, previously advertised through newspapers and online platforms, were now being channelled through regional governors’ offices and regional councils to improve access across the country.
The opportunities included postgraduate studies in oil and gas management, energy economics and law, petroleum engineering, drilling engineering, subsea engineering and other technical disciplines.
Shilunga said some scholarship application periods had closed on 30 October and 6 November, while applications for a master’s programme in manufacturing engineering, specialising in welding engineering and offered in collaboration with the University of Namibia, would close on 16 November 2026.
However, the discussion revealed possible weaknesses in the new information-sharing arrangement when the Erongo governor appeared to indicate that her office had not received some of the scholarship advertisements.
Shilunga acknowledged that the distribution system needed closer monitoring to ensure that information sent to regional offices was actually received.
“Perhaps we need to make sure that once we send them through to the governor’s offices, we should then be doing follow-ups to call and to find out whether they have been received,” she said.
She undertook to improve the process following the concerns raised at the meeting.
The exchange highlighted the importance of communication between the Presidency, petroleum institutions and regional authorities as Namibia prepares its workforce for opportunities associated with oil and gas development.
Although the President did not announce a new petroleum communication strategy, her acknowledgement of the problem, together with the concerns raised about access to training, placed greater attention on how government information reaches communities and prospective participants in the sector.
The meeting also raised the question of whether existing communication channels are sufficient to ensure that Namibians, particularly those outside established industry networks, are informed about opportunities arising from petroleum development.
