In A delightful display of administrative schizophrenia, Windhoek manages to combine the heavy-handed state capitalism of Beijing with the discredited market fundamentalism of 1980s Westminster.
On Monday, the state behaves like a central planning committee, bypassing competitive bidding to shower state-owned enterprises with infrastructure contracts for roads and classrooms.
By Tuesday, Cabinet ministers assemble to recite trickle-down catechisms, eager to convert public accommodation into revenue-generation machinery.
Nowhere is this farce more grotesque than in the crusade led by works and transport minister Veikko Nekundi and his freshly minted Public Assets Management Agency of Namibia (Pama).
Driven by an urge to wring profits from public bricks and mortar, Nekundi looks at chaotic state flats, where desperate overcrowding has forced residents to erect makeshift kambashus on balconies, and sees not a tragic failure of public welfare, but an underperforming investment portfolio.
Through Pama accounting officer Kristofine Itembu-Naunyango, the state promises to commercialise residential properties, vacant land, and billboards, while issuing cold 30-day eviction notices to retired civil servants.
One must ask what prevents ministry bureaucrats from demonstrating professional competence without wrapping themselves in the predatory logic of commercial asset management. Public accommodation exists to facilitate public service, not to act as a landlord squeezing margin out of underpaid nurses.
This market-driven madness ignores the historical geographical trauma shared across southern Africa. Like our neighbours, Namibia remains profoundly scarred by apartheid spatial planning, which intentionally banished working class communities to distant, under-serviced peripheries.
The folly of treating well-located public land as mere cash cows was laid bare on 2 July 2026, when South Africa’s Constitutional Court delivered a unanimous landmark ruling on the former Tafelberg property in Sea Point.
The court declared that the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape government had failed in their constitutional duty to address apartheid spatial planning by neglecting affordable housing on prime, well-located public assets.
Yet, while regional jurisprudence rightly demands that state land be weaponised against spatial segregation, Windhoek marches blindly in the opposite direction, actively privatising inner-city public housing stock.
This obsession with marketising social infrastructure arrives as the global neoliberal model collapses under its own contradictions.
When Margaret Thatcher privatised British water, gas, and electricity, proponents promised efficiency and capital ownership. Decades later, the result is soaring bills, staggering corporate debt, dividend extractions, and sewage-polluted rivers.
The United Kingdom is now clawing its way back towards public ownership, having learned that essential monopolies collapse when subjected to profit motives. Watching Namibian ministers parrot these tired lines while the average national house price hovers at an unreachable N$1.4 million would be hilarious if the housing backlog wasn’t over 300 000.
Privatising housing stock while the government has not proven the ability to make dignified housing a thing.
To resolve this national housing crisis and shelter our homeless civil servants, the government must abandon these market-driven illusions.
First, the state must establish non-profit public housing trusts that utilise state-owned land directly for affordable residential construction, utilising cost-recovery models rather than profit-seeking Pama directives.
Second, instead of evicting civil servants or selling housing stock to commercial speculators and their friends, the administration should implement structured rent-to-own schemes for essential workers, offsetting low civil service wages with spatial housing security.
Finally, the uncompetitive state contracts currently handed out for roads and schools must be tied directly to local community building mandates, cross-subsidising low-income housing development through infrastructure expenditure.
Service delivery is a social obligation not a balance sheet to be monetised.
Until the administration realises that statecraft requires moral purpose rather than contradictory economic buzzwords, Namibia will continue building infrastructure like a socialist regime while treating its own public servants with the cold indifference of a rogue landlord.
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