A phone number used to be just a phone number.
Today it is much more. It is how employers contact job seekers, how banks send notifications, how government departments communicate with citizens, and how schools, clinics, businesses and family members find us.
For many Namibians, a phone number has become part of their digital identity.
That is why the issue of mobile number cancellation deserves more public attention than it receives.
Most people understand that telecommunications companies need rules for managing inactive numbers.
Number ranges are finite and networks must be managed efficiently.
The problem arises when efficiency becomes more important than the people the system is supposed to serve.
Consider a pensioner who buys airtime only when money is available, an unemployed person who may go months without recharging a phone, or a seasonal worker whose income fluctuates throughout the year.
When an inactive number is eventually cancelled and recycled, the consequences can be significant.
Potential employers lose contact with job seekers. Banks lose a communication channel with their customers.
Government departments lose a way of reaching citizens.
Family members lose a trusted point of contact.
What appears to be a simple administrative process can have real human consequences.
A mobile number is an address for opportunity.
Increasingly, it is how people participate in the modern economy and society.
We would never accept a citizen losing their national identity because they had not used it often enough.
Yet we have become comfortable with people losing their digital identities through which modern society increasingly communicates with them.
The irony is that Namibia’s telecommunications laws are built on the principle that access to communication is a public good.
The Communications Act provides for a Universal Service Fund to help ensure communication services reach communities that market forces alone might not serve.
The principle behind the fund is straightforward: connectivity is too important to be determined entirely by commercial considerations.
Parliament recognised that some communities would remain unconnected if profitability were the only consideration.
Every citizen matters, not only the customers who generate the highest returns.
Yet the history of the Universal Service Fund raises uncomfortable questions.
Although the legal provisions came into force in 2016, the fund only became operational years later.
The legal arguments surrounding its implementation may have been legitimate.
Companies have every right to challenge regulations they believe are unfair.
But while regulators and operators argued, communities waiting for improved connectivity continued to wait.
The larger question is whether we have slowly begun viewing telecommunications primarily as a business rather than as essential infrastructure.
Our telecommunications companies, established with government involvement and development-oriented international partners, were rooted in a broader vision of national development and inclusion.
That vision should still matter today.
This is not an argument against profit.
Profitable companies create jobs, invest in infrastructure and contribute to economic growth.
But profit should be a means to a public purpose, not the purpose itself.
The real question is not whether these companies are profitable.
The real question is who that profitability ultimately serves.
When a company is rooted in public ownership and developmental objectives, its performance should not be measured only by dividends and financial returns.
It should also be measured by whether ordinary citizens are better connected, better served and better included in the opportunities of modern life.
The real measure of a state-owned enterprise is not how much profit it generates. It is whether it continues to advance the public purpose for which it was created.
Universal service is not ultimately about towers, fibre networks or spectrum licences. It is about people.
And when corporate convenience begins to outweigh the needs of the people a public enterprise was created to serve, it may be time to ask whether it has forgotten its purpose.
– Milton Louw
