951 real jobs, and a Ministry that says jobs are not its job

Statement by the Shadow Minister of International Relations and Trade

1. What 9,343 jobs mean against the President’s promise of 500,000 in five years, and over what period they were created. Nobody knows the period, because the Ministry never said.

2. The figure comes from its reply to my Question 181, tabled on 18 September 2025, and the table attached to that reply sorts 28 projects by stage, operating or still in development, without a single date. A jobs count with no start date cannot be measured against a five-year promise.

3. The 9,343 sits under “Permanent Jobs”, which is what the projects promised. The column headed “Actual Jobs Created (Permanent)” totals 951. From N$66.85 billion announced, N$7.74 billion is recorded as actually invested. The biggest single line, Hylron Phase 1 at Walvis Bay, carries N$37.23 billion and 4,000 permanent jobs, with nothing invested and nobody employed.

4. Even counting every seasonal and temporary job the Ministry recorded, the actual total is 4,125 and the table does not reconcile with itself: a school in Lüderitz was presented to the House as “Digital and Global Business Services”, a kelp farm is credited with 92 jobs on N$900,000 of an announced N$900 million, and a farm expansion announced at N$98 million is recorded at N$2 billion.

5. The rest of the reply is no firmer. The Ministry says it is “not directly involved in job creation”, yet claims 9,343 jobs for itself. Asked how many jobs would come from trade agreements, exports and investment, it gave no split, offering instead targets of N$254 billion in investment and N$168 billion in exports with no year attached, and a line that oil and gas “could create thousands of jobs”.

6. Progress reporting was handed to the Namibia Statistics Agency and the labour ministry’s employment system, neither of which tracks these 28 projects. And the International Trade Management Bill, promised to the House for “next month”, was still described by the Minister as a draft on 25 July 2026, ten months later. A timeline that slips that far is not a plan.

7. The arithmetic is unforgiving. Five hundred thousand jobs in five years is 100,000 a year, about 274 every day. The 951 jobs the Ministry could actually show amount to roughly three and a half days of the President’s pace, and even the 9,343 on paper is under 2% of the target.

8. At this pace the promise will not be kept. The fitter in Walvis Bay who was told 4,000 hydrogen jobs were coming, and the grape picker in Aussenkher on a seasonal contract, cannot live on a column of projections.

9. What would move the number is ordinary work: a dated quarterly register, project by project, of jobs promised against jobs verified through Social Security; clearing the permits, land, water and power hold-ups that keep signed capital idle; backing the sectors that hire, where agro-processing costs about N$2.2 million per promised job against over N$9 million for hydrogen.

10. “Government does not need a bigger number. It needs a truer one, dated and verified against Social Security records. A pledge of 500,000 jobs cannot be defended with a table where the promises add up to 9,343 and the jobs add up to 951.

Namibia is all we have
Namibia is not for sale
We must and can save it!

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