Namibia needs federalism now

Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel laureate who in 1939 set out the economic case for interstate federalism, observed that the knowledge on which a rational economy depends “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”No ministry in Windhoek, however diligent, can know what the cattle farmer in Ohangwena, the fisherman in Lüderitz or the conservancy guide in Sesfontein knows about the economy beneath their feet. Yet 36 years after independence, it is Windhoek that decides for them all.The consequences are written into our national statistics. The 2023 census placed unemployment at 36.9%. The national poverty index found 79.6% of Kavango West’s residents multidimensionally poor, against 15.7% in Erongo. Regional governors are appointed by the president, not elected, and a decentralisation policy adopted in 1998 had, by 2021, failed to devolve a single central government function in full. This is not the failing of any one administration. It is the predictable output of a system that concentrates authority, revenue, and initiative in one place.What federations have builtHistory returns a remarkably consistent verdict. In the 1950s, Obafemi Awolowo’s Western Region of Nigeria used its autonomy and its cocoa revenues to introduce free primary education and, in 1959, Africa’s first television service. Post-war Bavaria, long a largely agrarian state, drew some €3.4 billion from Germany’s federal equalization system before becoming one of its paymasters, contributing without interruption since 1993. Alberta, which owns its oil under Canada’s federal constitution, created a Heritage Savings Trust Fund in 1976 to convert finite petroleum into permanent public wealth. Dubai, an emirate of modest oil reserves, turned autonomy over its own economic affairs into a global hub of trade, aviation, and finance.Our own neighborhood is learning the same lesson. South Africa, with no federation in name, entrusted its nine provinces with legislatures, premiers and a constitutional share of national revenue. Kenya’s 2010 Constitution devolved power to 47 elected county governments and guaranteed them no less than 15% of national revenue. Semi-arid Makueni and Kitui have since used county funds to build mango and leather industries, and modern medical equipment, once the privilege of cities, now reaches all 47 counties.Transformation Namibia needsNamibia stands at the threshold of the most consequential economic decade in its history, and every one of its great opportunities is regional in character. The economist Wallace Oates, father of modern fiscal federalism, held that each public service should be provided by the smallest jurisdiction that bears its costs and captures its benefits. Our opportunities demand exactly that.In //Kharas, the green hydrogen project near Lüderitz is valued at some US$10 billion and promises about 15 000 construction jobs, while discoveries in the offshore Orange Basin herald an oil economy. Without a southern state holding a constitutional claim to a share of royalties and a seat at the negotiating table, the South risks becoming a corridor through which wealth merely passes. Alberta shows the alternative.North of the veterinary cordon fence, communal farmers remain shut out of the best-paying beef markets. A northern state with its own veterinary authority, abattoirs, and marketing agency could build the disease-free zones and value chains that have eluded a distant ministry for three decades. Along the perennial Okavango and Zambezi, irrigated agriculture and agro-processing could feed the nation and supply Angola, Zambia, and Botswana if regions were free to plan and invest. And in Kunene and Zambezi, communal conservancies already prove what the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom demonstrated across the world: communities entrusted with their own resources govern them well.LPM factor The Landless People’s Movement’s 2024 manifesto proposes “six to eight federal states," each “endowed with substantive administrative and fiscal autonomy," and an end to “the monopolisation of public funds at the center." The program is born of the land question. Those dispossessed most deeply by conquest still find decisions over their land, water, and minerals taken by officials who will never live with the consequences. Crucially, the movement seeks no mandate to impose this change. It asks the people to decide it in a referendum.Federalism is not secession. James Madison, a principal architect of the American constitution, saw in divided power “a double security” for the rights of the people, because “the different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that town meetings “are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach.” State boundaries drawn by an independent commission on economic rather than ethnic lines, one Bill of Rights and a constitutional equalization fund would bind the republic more firmly, not less.In 1863 the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon warned that “the twentieth century will open the age of federations, or else humanity will undergo another purgatory of a thousand years.” Namibia has already spent thirty-six years in the waiting room of the center. Unity is not uniformity. The choice before this generation is whether every region becomes a partner in the republic or remains a petitioner at its door.*Joyce Muzengua is the head of LPM’s Human Rights Department.

Namibia needs federalism now

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Namibian Sun 2026-10-23

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Namibia needs federalism now

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Namibian Sun 2026-10-23

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