The establishment of a raft of new task forces by President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah on Monday, 1 December 2025, is not a revolutionary act to rush to the rescue of Namibia’s downtrodden.
It’s rather a flatfooted shuffle by an old bureaucrat belatedly learning to tango.
The taskforces on health, land and housing and economic recovery evolved from a marathon public-private partnership rendezvous the president had with business people recently.
Namibians are used to presidents gyrating to a pulsating African beat when performing in front of voters but waltzing to the tune of their funders when having to deliver medicine, houses, water or anything tangible. The president would do well to remember that Namibians have just shown that they are willing to vote anyone out who doesn’t deliver houses.
The establishment of the taskforces reeks of a president who is ratcheting up a list of things to read out in a State of the Nation Address that is about four months away while most of her campaign promises are already rotting away untouched for a year with none showing signs of remotely being achieved.
President Hage Geingob had a series of these committees, commissions and plans. In 2019, he declared the living conditions in informal settlements a national humanitarian crisis, which he referred to as a state of emergency, to address the issues of poverty, dignity, and poor living conditions, including the proliferation of shacks.
And then?
The more I look at it, the more it looks like a deliberate distraction from various government flops.
It’s also a fresh opportunity for the elite responsible for the nation’s current stagnation to dictate its future.
Addressing the public, the President said she is aware that some people may have wondered whether it would just become lip service again.
She said, “our approach is one of business unusual because the challenges we face demand nothing less.”
The president’s “business unusual” mantra rings hollow when one looks at the list of appointees, confirming every suspicion that this is, indeed, the very definition of political lip service.
I hope this gimmick will prove me wrong but if the president’s record is anything to go by, this attempt at coming together to talk about finding solutions to suggest recommendations to other people some time in the future, without clear instructions, too shall pass by without it changing anyone’s life.
The composition of these task forces is perhaps the most damning indictment of the entire exercise.
While the President notes that the members will be “composed of individuals from diverse backgrounds” whose “diversity reflects our belief that no single sector holds all the answers,” this supposed breadth masks a deeply skewed power structure.
The notable presence of large numbers of white business people and commercial bank executives exposes this initiative as yet another attempt to placate and ‘empower’ the financial elite.
These individuals, steeped in unearned privilege derived from the structural economic legacy of the country, inhabit a social stratosphere utterly out of touch with the daily reality of the average Namibian. They do not know the soul-destroying pain of the employed poor. Those who work full-time yet still cannot afford food, escape the debt trap, or provide dignified housing for their families.
A bank executive on one of the task forces has been reported to earn N$14 million last year while some banks still pay their multiskilled consultants, the first contact inside banks nowadays, a shameful N$10 000 per month.
The worldview of the taskforce members is defined by profit margins, not the struggle for survival.
You can’t put hardened capitalists in charge of finding solutions for housing. We’ve tried that route for 35 years.
Their solutions are clearly not working for the many. It works very well for the few, though.
The capitalists have only managed to grow Namibia’s housing backlog, rental market and their enormous wealth. Knocking on their doors for solutions to the problem they created, with the help of the political elite, seems counterproductive.
Why is it so difficult to apply socialist solutions to challenges where capitalism clearly only brought misery?
The inclusion of bank executives raises a chilling red flag, casting this exercise as a pre-planned feast for the financial sector.
This entire debacle echoes the disastrous attempt a few years ago to grant workers controlled access to their pension funds for home building or extension. That supposedly pro-poor measure was morphed into an eating opportunity for commercial banks, turning a measure of social relief into another commercial profit stream. It is entirely predictable that this new attempt to find solutions for Namibia’s most pressing problems, be it affording food or land delivery, will go the exact same way.
We must ask the fundamental question: Why entrust the same people who drove the bus into the ditch to get us out of the ditch?
While the elite deliberate in comfortable committee rooms, the majority of Namibians are struggling under the crushing weight of economic despair, a reality frequently documented by Namibian media of all stripes. Poverty fueled by deliberate whittling away at workers’ benefits and pay and halting hiring years ago.
The government is complicit because they allowed labour unions, laws and institutions like the Labour Commissioner’s office to be hollowed out and weakened while financial predation of the average worker is very real. Namibian businesses, especially banks, don’t need any help making more money. They should not be allowed anywhere near finding solutions for the problems they had helped to engineer.
The officials may claim economic stability, but as the financial sector’s heavy representation on these very bodies is an affront to Namibians suffering from banks and their greed.
POLITICAL CEMETERY
The task force model itself is a time-honoured political tactic used globally when governments wish to appear active while ensuring a problem is not actually solved. Throughout history, the appointment of commissions, committees, or task forces has served as a political burial ground for inconvenient issues.
These commissions produce eloquently written, radical reports that were ultimately ignored by the executive branch because the political will to implement fundamental change was absent. Nandi-Ndaitwah was a Cabinet member since independence so she has been part of the decisions and the failures.
More critically, the Presidency has a history of instituting presidential commissions of inquiry and then letting them die in the dust.
Independent bodies are often captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate, serving to dilute competition rather than protect the public.
By creating an unelected, external body, the administration is ensuring the issue is moved off the immediate legislative agenda, guaranteeing the delay, dilution, and eventual disappointment of the populace.
The President does not lack the administrative and legal tools to solve the various crises under her watch but might have run out of energy, dance moves or political will to keep fighting.
The President’s toolbox: a legislative mandate to draft and pass necessary land reform legislation (which is underway but MPs have already showed it up as a farce) or reform the banking sector; Budgetary power to immediately re-prioritise national spending away from non-essential items into for example mass housing projects; the ability to direct State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) like the National Housing Enterprise to aggressively build at scale; and executive authority to streamline bureaucratic processes that currently impede land servicing.
These unelected task forces present significant, unnecessary risks to national sovereignty and integrity. Operating outside the formal, transparent governmental structure, they become a high-risk conduit for influence.
Foreign interests, or unfriendly states, can easily use their well-connected local proxies on these bodies to steer recommendations and effectively influence official policy away from the national interest.
The banks are, anyway, multinational companies who take their cues from their bosses in South Africa and elsewhere. If they were interested in bettering Namibian lives they had more than ample opportunity in 35 years.
And most Namibian bank executives have about as much agency as these task forces.
Furthermore, these bodies could be a hotbed for influence peddling and creating rentseeking opportunities.
The concentration of business interests could mean possible plans to push the country into purchasing expensive, unnecessary foreign solutions that could result in lucrative tenders for task force members or their associates, a pattern seen repeatedly in public tender processes.
Finally, the vagueness of the terms of reference is the final, institutionalised flaw. The President states the Health Task Force’s most crucial reference document will be the report of 2013 on health, commissioned by former president Hifikepunye Pohamba, and the Economic Recovery group will consult “the post COVID-19 economic recovery document.”
Prescribing decade-old or widely critiqued pre-existing documents confirms that the new bodies are not tasked with radical, fresh action, but with re-packaging old wine in new bottles.
Vague seeds yield vague outcomes, ensuring that no Task Force member can be held accountable when, inevitably, zero tangible difference is made to the lives of suffering Namibians.
