Namibia’s refusal to sign the Samoa Agreement on 14 November 2023 should not have come as a surprise because the southern African country also refused to sign the European Partnership Agreement in 2013.
This time, however, Namibia could miss out on a €1b funding package to push its ambitious green hydrogen project and improve infrastructure to export raw materials.
Namibia and 34 other countries refused to sign the agreement on 14 November 2023 in Apia, the capital of the Caribbean Island of Samoa.
The Samoa Agreement brings together the European Union and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS).
The provisional application of the agreement will start on 1 January 2024.
The Agreement will enter into force upon consent by the European Parliament and ratification by the Parties, i.e., all EU Member States and at least two thirds of the OACPS Members.
Through the European Investment Bank (EIB) Global, the EU pledged €150b in funding for green energy and raw materials partnerships for the OACPS.
Namibia is developing the biggest green hydrogen plant in sub-Saharan Africa, and the EU has pledged €1b for the project and critical raw materials.
The Namibia-EU €1b partnership involved revolutionising sustainable raw materials value chains and renewable hydrogen initiatives.
The partners wanted to streamline value chains by collaborating with industry stakeholders to identify, promote, and facilitate cooperation in the exploration and commercialisation of critical raw material projects.
They also wanted to work together to leverage environmental, social, and governance criteria, including mapping and assessing abandoned mines and supporting Namibia in utilising ‘Earth Observation’ and remote sensing techniques for resource exploration, land use planning, and management.
Part of the agreement was to fund the soft and hard infrastructure, including selected mining, refining, mineral green processing projects and investments in water, rail, and renewable energy projects.
Notable are the plans to transform the Port of Walvis Bay into an industrial and logistics hub in the region with the help of the Port of Antwerp and Bruges International.
The other aspect was to enhance capacity and skills within the raw material and green hydrogen value chains, identifying training and skill requirements and enhancing technical and vocational training.
The EU pledged to assist Namibia in developing a national strategy for critical raw materials and enacting a synthetic fuel act to create an enabling environment for the hydrogen and synthetic fuels industry.
It’s about the Constitution
Namibia’s head of delegation, Obeth Kandjoze, told Devex that the southern African would not sign because of interpretative issues about the Constitution.
“We are worried, of course, just like anybody else,” Kandjoze told Devex, a social enterprise and media platform for the global development community.
Kandjoze added: “But the constitution is what it is.”
The international relations minister, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, told parliament on 1 November that Namibia would not sign the 20-year deal in its current form.
Nandi-Ndaitwah said Namibia was concerned with the absence of a glossary of terms or a definitions section within the agreement.
She also said the agreement refers to a commitment to the full and effective implementation of future outcomes of Beijing and the International Conference on Population and Development review conferences.
According to Nandi-Ndaitwah, signing such an agreement could bind signatory countries to processes and outcomes.
Nandi-Ndaitwah revealed that the attorney general had flagged these prescriptive provisions that impose certain actions not in line with the Namibian Constitution in 2021.
She said Namibia informed the EU of the issues in February 2022, but nothing was done to rectify them.
After negotiations had closed, the minister said the EU had unilaterally removed the new agreement’s provisions for declarations in Article 6.
Nandi-Ndaitwah raised concerns with Article 97, which states that no treaty, convention, agreement or arrangement of any kind between one or more member states of the EU and one or more OACPS members shall impede the implementation of this agreement.
No signature, no new loans
Addressing a closed meeting in Apia a day before the signing ceremony, the head of the Latin America and Asia division at EIB Global, Diederick Zambon, said the bank would have no mandate to operate or sign new loans with Namibia if the country refuses to sign by the end of the year.
If the EU loses Namibia, it will miss out on the green hydrogen and the critical raw materials the southern African country has in abundance.
Even the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen admitted in Brussels in October that Namibia was becoming a front-runner in the green hydrogen space.
“The EU is proud to partner in this transformative journey towards green industrialisation. Together, we can further decarbonise our economies, create jobs and ensure a more prosperous and greener future for our societies,” Von der Leyen said when she met President Hage Geingob on the sidelines of the Global Gateway summit.
In November 2022, Namibia and the EU signed an MoU to establish a strategic partnership on sustainable raw materials value chains and renewable hydrogen.
The EU, with the European Investment Bank and member states including Germany, Netherlands, France, Belgium and Finland, in a Team Europe approach, supports Namibia’s green recovery in line with the Harambee Prosperity Plan II, Vision 2030.
In turn, the EU needs to secure a sustainable supply of raw materials, especially critical ones, as an essential prerequisite for delivering on green and clean energy objectives.
If Namibia does not sign, it loses the much-needed funding to develop the green hydrogen project and to construct or improve infrastructure, such as the Walvis Bay and Luderitz ports, which are instrumental in exporting raw materials.
As he said in Brussels, even Geingob recognises the need to raise capital.
“Namibia recognises that its world-class renewable energy resources provide a strong foundation upon which we will build a sustainable and impactful green industrial base.
“Namibia is also cognisant that to fully capture the opportunity at hand, we will have to mobilise fit-for-purpose capital that appropriately prices risk to optimise the cost of said capital. This key element will form the cornerstone of this transformative partnership with the EU,” Geingob said.
All the EU-ACP agreements
The Samoa agreement replaces the Cotonou agreement of 2000, which came into effect when the 1975 Lomé Convention was renegotiated successively into Lomé I, Lomé II, Lomé III, and Lomé IV, which was signed in 1989.
At face value, the Lomé Convention and the Cotonou Agreement seem similar; the Cotonou Agreement provided a comprehensive framework to address the political, economic, social, cultural and environmental aspects.
The Cotonou agreement had three pillars: development cooperation, economic and trade cooperation and political dimension, while the Samoa agreement has five priority areas – human rights, democracy and governance, peace and security, human and social development, inclusive, sustainable economic growth and development
environmental sustainability and climate change, migration and mobility.
The Samoa agreement includes a common foundation, which applies to all Parties, combined with three regional protocols for Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific with a focus on the specific needs of each region.
The 27 EU member states and the 79 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries represent around 2 billion people and more than half of the seats at the United Nations.
With this new agreement, the parties will be better equipped to address emerging needs and global challenges, such as climate change, ocean governance, migration, health, peace and security.
The ACP-EU partnership is one of the oldest and most comprehensive frameworks for cooperation between the EU and third countries.
The Cotonou agreement was initially due to expire in February 2020. Its provisions have been extended until the new partnership agreement between the EU and the ACP countries provisionally applied or entered into force.
The post-Cotonou negotiations started in September 2018 on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York to agree on a new, modernised treaty to succeed the Cotonou Agreement. The chief negotiators initialled the new Agreement in April 2021.
The Council adopted a decision on the signature and provisional application of the agreement on 20 July 2023.
The European Partnership Agreement
The Cotonou Agreement required Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (ACP) States to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) to replace the trade component of Lomé IV.
The EPA was supposed to broaden access for the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM) goods and services to the European markets, including the French territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana.
Under the EPA, the ACP was expected to open its markets to European exports and provide opportunities for investment promotion and for ACP firms to improve their international competitiveness.
ACP states would enjoy duty-free, quota-free access and several financing and technical assistance measures to reduce the cost of exporting to Europe, especially where these arise from administrative and processing inefficiencies and obligations.
In return, the broader expectation was that consumers in the ACP states would benefit from lower prices due to improved competition between ACP and European goods.
Although Namibia signed the interim EPA agreement in January 2008,
it refused to ratify the agreement in 2010, saying the country would get a raw deal if it signed the agreement as it was.
The fear was that the EPA would see an influx of subsidised European products in the local market, thereby hampering local producers.
The European Commission cut Namibia’s duty and quota-free market access for beef, grapes and fish in September 2011 to arm-twist Namibia to sign by January 2014.
Namibia wanted to negotiate and ratify the EPA by January 2016.
Former trade minister Calle Schlettwein, who took over from Hage Geingob in 2012, said: “We should not allow ourselves to be pushed into a corner where the commitments that we then sign harm our ability to develop.”
Schlettwein said Namibia hoped the unresolved issues would be resolved so they would not harm Namibia.
The former trade permanent secretary Malan Lindeque told the former EU commissioner for trade Karel de Gucht in Windhoek in 2013 that an ideal solution was to negotiate for a win-win situation.
Lindeque said external forces would not force Namibia to sign the EPA and that the government would only sign if it were in the country’s interests.
“A mutual and beneficial agreement on constructive manners is what Namibia wants,” said Lindeque, adding that Namibia wanted an agreement that would benefit it in the long run.
De Gucht warned that after that date, “Namibia would not be eligible for preferential treatment for its exports to EU unless it ratifies an EPA.”
Namibia, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique and South Africa finally ratified the EPA in June 2016, which provisionally came into force in October 2016.
