EDITORIAL: Fishing reforms trapped in repetition

Successive fisheries ministers have promised greater local processing, more jobs and an end to quota trading, but three decades later the same reforms remain unfinished.

Three decades of policy statements have still not produced the complete transformation repeatedly promised in Namibia’s fishing sector. The 70:30 policy was introduced in the early 1990s to expand onshore processing and employment.

In 2005, fisheries minister Abraham Iyambo condemned quota trading and demanded clarity on where catches would be processed. Bernhard Esau repeated the local-processing commitment in 2011 and again during the 2018 fishing-rights allocation process. In August 2025, fisheries minister Inge Zaamwani promised mandatory processing requirements, 15 000 jobs and a reduction in raw-fish exports.

This year, President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah has raised the issue twice already. In April, she said monk was processed entirely locally, and that full local processing of hake was approaching. At last week’s National Fisheries Indaba, she went further and called for everything to be landed and processed in Namibia. Yet the same problems remain. Fish is processed offshore, quotas are traded, rights allocations suffer delays, ownership remains contested, and coastal unemployment persists. Maybe the start should be to look into why reforms announced over three decades remain unfinished, instead of having another fishing indaba.