EDITORIAL: Empowerment for whom?

Sisa Namandje is right to raise concerns about the economic plight of historically disadvantaged black Namibians. Where he is wrong is in suggesting that meaningful opportunities have not been created. They have.

The uncomfortable truth is that many of those opportunities were hijacked long before they could reach the masses they were intended to benefit.

Namibia did not fail to create empowerment programmes. It failed to prevent their capture by a small political and business elite that has turned empowerment into a private club.

Since independence, government has rolled out one initiative after another in pursuit of economic justice. Fishing quotas, affirmative action, employment equity, resettlement farms, empowerment shareholding deals, and state tenders were all meant to create a broader ownership of the economy.

Yet nearly four decades later, vast numbers of ordinary black Namibians remain spectators in an economy that was supposedly being transformed on their behalf.

When fishing quotas are allocated, who benefits? Is it the unemployed youth in Mpungu, the struggling family in Khorixas or the pensioner in Katima Mulilo?

The Atlantic Ocean belongs to all Namibians. Yet for many citizens, its riches might as well be on another continent.

Some people have become permanent beneficiaries of empowerment. Their children will likely inherit those benefits. Meanwhile, the communities in whose name these programmes were established continue to wrestle with poverty, unemployment and hopelessness. That is not empowerment. It is recycling privilege.

Namibia's challenge today is therefore not a shortage of opportunities. It is the narrow pipeline through which those opportunities flow.

Until empowerment reaches beyond boardrooms, political networks and familiar surnames, the majority of black Namibians will continue to feel excluded from the very programmes designed to uplift them. And that frustration will only grow louder with time.