Energy Explainer Part 5: What Lasting Prosperity From Oil Looks Like

Welcome to the final instalment.

If you have walked this road with me, you know the kitchen by heart: We explained what local content means, were honest about the small and medium enterprise (SME) readiness gap, asked what the ‘neighbour’, the international oil company, looks for, and mapped what only the ‘homeowner’, the government, can do.

Today we ask the only question that ever mattered: After the cake is baked and the kitchen is quiet again, did the family actually eat?

Every policy and supplier register is a means to an end. The end is a grandmother at Lüderitz, a welder at Walvis Bay, or a graduate at Khorixas feeling the difference.

If they don’t, we would simply have served the cake through the window again.

TotalEnergies’ Venus discovery, the largest ever in sub-Saharan Africa at around 5.1 billion barrels in place, is heading toward a final investment decision in 2026, with first oil expected around 2029.

Analysts believe Namibia could produce 300 000 to 400 000 barrels a day by the mid-2030s.

Now the sobering half: Our economy grew just 1.7% in 2025, and youth unemployment remains among the highest in the region.

GREAT TABLE, NO FEAST

We are setting a magnificent table for a feast that has not yet arrived, yet the people who are hungry are hungry today.

Across the world, oil has more often been a curse than a blessing: A small connected class grows wealthy, and when the price falls, as it always does, the country is left poorer than before.

Economists call it the resource curse. Namibians have a simpler name: Watching from the window. It is where the neighbour bakes a magnificent cake using our oven, pays a few relatives to carry ingredients, and leaves with the recipe, the profits and the skills.

The family ate a slice that day; the next morning nobody learned to bake.

Now the other picture – Namibia 15 years from now: At Walvis Bay, a welder who started with a single Petrofund certification employs 19 people and supplies the offshore platforms.

At Khorixas, a graduate holds a subsea engineering role that a decade earlier would have gone automatically to a fly-in expatriate, because mandatory skills transfer reporting made it the law. The recipe stayed in the house.

And the grandmother at Lüderitz never works a day in oil, yet feels the difference: a clinic with a doctor, a school roof that does not leak, a grant that arrives on time, because an independently audited sovereign wealth framework let the returns, not the oil itself, pay for her country.

This is not a fairy tale. It is simply Norway. It did not spend the oil money; it built a bakery and kept the ovens running. Its fund now holds around US$2.2 trillion, and by law the government may spend only the expected real return, never the capital.

Our Welwitschia Fund, holding roughly N$460 million as of March 2025, is the seed of that promise.

The long game is not won at the dramatic moment of first oil, with cameras rolling. It is won or lost in the boring years before then, the SME certified this year, the curriculum redesigned this semester, the fund ring-fenced before the first cheque arrives.

The grandmother’s clinic in 2040 is being decided on in a committee room in 2026.

So here we are. The neighbour is at the door. The kitchen has good bones. The recipe is finally written down.

The difference was never the geology. It was the discipline to build the bakery instead of devouring the cake. The kitchen is ours. Let us bake.

– Mutindi Jacobs is an oil and gas lawyer. Through her ‘Energy Explainer’ series, she aims to simplify Namibia’s oil and gas sector so anyone can understand, engage, and benefit from it. Follow her newsletter on LinkedIn.

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