This week Namibia sits down to turn its oil discoveries into local opportunity.
We are defining that opportunity too small. The prize is not only to supply the find. It is to own it.
Off our southern coast, in the Orange Basin, the majors have found what may be one of the largest oil provinces opened this century. Venus, Graff, Mopane: names that now carry a Namibia’s expectations.
This week, in Windhoek, the government, operators and Namibian businesses sit down at the Namibia Oil and Gas
Conference 2026 to ask how the country captures the value.
It is the right question, asked at the right time. I worry only that we are answering it too modestly.
The language of the moment is “local content”, and it is a good language.
Namibian suppliers, Namibian labour, Namibian camps and caterers and trucks: all of it matters, and all of it is worth fighting for. But local content, as it is usually
drawn, buys us the edges of the industry. It sells the boom a service. It does not give us a stake in the boom itself. And the distance between selling a service andholding a stake is the distance between a wage and wealth.
Consider the two roads out of a large oil find. On the first, a country rents out its geology: it licenses the resource, collects royalties and taxes, supplies what it can, and watches the profit sail north. On the second, it owns a piece: the state and its citizens hold equity in the barrels, and the returns compound at home. Norway did not become Norway because it found the most oil.
It became Norway because it decided, early and deliberately, to own its oil. The geology was luck. The ownership was a choice.
Namibia has made a start. Our petroleum resources vest in the state, and the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia carries a stake in the licences on the nation’s behalf. But a carried interest held by one company is not the same as ownership held broadly, by Namibians, through the savings that are already ours.
And here is the part we keep postponing: the cheapest moment to buy into an oil project is now, before the final investment decision, before first oil, when the risk is real and the entry price is lowest. Wait until the barrels are flowing, and we will be buying our own future back at a premium, if we are let in at all.
We are not short of the capital to do this. There is more than N$280 billion under management in this country, N$221 billion in the Government Institutions Pension Fund alone, and our own regulations already require a share of it to work at home.
What we have lacked is not money. It is the will, and the wiring, to point that money at the things that will define our economy for the next 50 years.
So let this conference be about more than contracts. Let it be about a mandate.
First, widen the ambition: treat local participation as equity, not only procurement and negotiate for it while we still hold the leverage.
Second, mobilise our own capital: build the vehicles that let Namibian pension and institutional money co-invest beside the majors and the development banks, structured so the risk sits with investors and not the fiscus.
Third, use the skill we already have: this country holds a small but real community of people who arrange capital and structure transactions for a living, and their moment is now.
And fourth, spend the dividend on ownership, not consumption: a boom that leaves behind schools we cannot staff and roads we cannot maintain has been eaten, not invested.
None of this is a quarrel with the operators, whose capital and expertise we genuinely need, nor with a government that has stewarded these discoveries with real care. It is an argument for ambition to match the size of the prize.
The rigs off Lüderitz are a magnificent thing. But an oilfield is only a windfall for the people who own a piece of it. For everyone else it is someone else’s fortune, drawn quietly from their sea. Namibia can still choose which of the two it will be. The barrels are not yet flowing. The decision, though, is being made right now.
– Jason Kasuto is the managing director of Monasa Advisory & Associates, a Namibian transaction advisory firm working across capital markets, research and development finance.
