Namibia has had three important public conversations in the past few months. Each one was badly explained, and not by accident.
In June, the country argued about whether mortgages should be repaid over five years instead of 20.
In the same month, Telecom Namibia signed deals to lease fibre from Demshi Investment Holdings and Lightstruck rather than build it.
On 31 August, Windhoek hosted the launch of the national Public Key Infrastructure, branded DigiNam, under the theme ‘Trust is now digital’.
Now walk into a cuca shop at Oshakati, or sit in a shared taxi in Katutura, and ask what any of it means.
You will not get confusion. You will get a shrug.
That is not a failure of public intelligence. It is a failure of professional communication, and it belongs to us.
The evidence is in how those three stories were told.
Take the mortgage debate. The proposition that reached the public was simple and emotionally satisfying: banks keep you in debt for 20 years while a car is paid off in five.
The answer came back in the language of prudential lending, loan-to-value ratios and debt-service-to-income benchmarks. Almost nobody laid out the arithmetic.
A shorter term means a higher monthly instalment, which means fewer Namibians qualify at all. A longer term means more interest in total.
That is a genuine trade-off, and citizens can weigh it. They were never shown it.
WORDS COUNT
So a real question, why the same affordability rule applies to a house that appreciates (in value) and a bakkie that does not, gets buried under noise.
Take DigiNam. Electronic signature regulations became operational on 15 June, and the Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia (Cran) now sits as Root Certification Authority.
In plain terms, an electronic signature is what I use when I sign a PDF instead of printing and scanning it. It only carries legal protection if my provider is accredited by Cran, and drawing the signature into the PDF myself does not count.
Any small business could use that. What travelled instead was public key infrastructure, trust anchors, certificate hierarchies and root keys, words that mean nothing outside a server room.
Take fibre leasing. The story that reached the public was copper theft, which is true but incomplete.
A state-owned enterprise renting rather than owning raises fair questions about long-term cost, pricing and who carries the risk.
Wrapped in open access and passive infrastructure, they never reached the people who pay the bill.
Obscurity is rewarded, and that is the real problem.
Some of this is genuine difficulty. Amortisation and cryptography are hard. But much of it is cultural.
In our professional world, complexity reads as seniority. The consultant who promises to operationalise a risk-based governance posture gets invited back.
The one who says we will decide who may see your information, and write it down, sounds junior.
We also forget that English is our official language, not our thinking language.
Most Namibians reason and make family decisions in Oshiwambo, Khoekhoegowab, Otjiherero, Afrikaans, Rukwangali or Silozi.
We have built the national backbone of explanation. We have never paid for the last mile.
BREAK IT DOWN
Five steps to explain anything to anyone.
- Lead with the consequence, not the mechanism. Say what changes in the listener’s or reader’s life first. Not “an open-access leasing model”, but “your internet should get cheaper and stop failing, and here is who now owns the cable”.
- Speak in the language people think in. A press release in vernacular that imports every English technical noun untouched is not a translation. Build the vocabulary, budget for radio, and stop treating an English website as communication achieved.
- Borrow a picture from the listener’s world. A root certification authority is the Home Affairs office of the internet: it vouches for who you are, and everyone else trusts it because they trust the source. A 20-year bond is a smaller bucket carried for longer.
- Simplify the words, never the truth. If the state-owned enterprise is renting rather than owning, say so.
If shorter mortgages price out the young, say so. The moment plain language is used to win agreement rather than create understanding, it has become marketing and people can smell it.
- Test at the receiving end. Before you launch, ask three people outside your sector to repeat your message back.
Whatever they get wrong is your defect. Then leave a door open: a number that is answered, a radio slot, a meeting the experts actually attend.
LET’S GET IT RIGHT
Three million people is small enough for a well-explained policy to be able to reach almost everyone. This costs habit, not money.
So when the public does not understand, let us stop saying awareness must be raised.
Let us say the accurate thing. We did not explain it. Then go back and do it properly.
– Job Angula is a technology risk and governance professional and the author of ‘Digital Namibia: From Paper to Progress’.
