Namibia Still Pays Pretoria for Permission to Breathe
Here in the ‘Land of the Brave’, we pride ourselves in our hard-won uhuru, but still can’t even visit the toilet without checking if South Africa has approved the two-ply. It’s 2026, and we are still playing the ultimate game of follow-my-leader with a neighbour whose house is literally in the middle of voluntary liquidation. […] The post Namibia Still Pays Pretoria for Permission to Breathe appeared first on The Namibian.
Black News 
Here in the ‘Land of the Brave’, we pride ourselves in our hard-won uhuru, but still can’t even visit the toilet without checking if South Africa has approved the two-ply.
It’s 2026, and we are still playing the ultimate game of follow-my-leader with a neighbour whose house is literally in the middle of voluntary liquidation.
Look at uncle Cyril Ramaphosa down south.
The man doesn’t look like a president any more; he looks like a tired business rescue dude sent in to manage the grand decline of the country before the whole thing goes into final insolvency.
It seems Namibians are hell-bent on fuelling that decline by supplying them with rusty old police and army rifles.
We’re apparently not happy with causing the slow collapse of Cupcake’s administration by relieving the contents of his Phala Phala couch before talking recklessly about it.
But despite having all the monies, we stand in the long queue at Shoprite, waiting for the trucks from across the Orange River to bring us everything from milk to toothpicks.
Over 70% of our daily commodities come from there. If Pretoria sneezes, the whole of Okuryangava gets a massive cold and starts looking for Panado, also imported from Gauteng.
Dis Windhoek hierso, where we glorify South African music above our own, we proudly don their sport jerseys over our own, and ‘our’ banks ship, undisturbed, their humongous profits down south, by the boatload, but their people are not looking for us Africans over there.
We saw it again just this week.
The absolute audacity of these guys is something else.
You hear people like uber Afrophobe Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma saying “Oh, we have no problem with Namibians”, right before launching into a massive, xenophobic rant about Nigerians.
But let’s be real, if South Africa kicked out every single foreign national tomorrow, the majority of their people would still be landless.
The wealth, the land, and the economy would still be heavily monopolised while the masses struggle.
The system needs low-cost labour and vast unemployment to keep the haves having.
The problem is poverty, deep-rooted racial inequality, and unemployment, but it’s always easier to blame the guy from up north.
And yet, we sit here quietly, taking notes from a country that is terminally confused.
Just last week, president Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah joined the mix, but all she brought back were words.
A Presidency statement after the visit basically said the meeting reaffirmed their nations’ strong fraternal and economic ties.
The leaders pledged to advance regional integration and maximise bilateral cooperation across sectors like trade and energy through the Bi-National Commission, which oversees over 150 shared agreements.
We are still sitting here scratching our heads, wondering if she even brought up the not-so-urgent matter of where the legal border of the Orange River is.
That border issue has been dragging on since forever, but maybe they were too busy discussing how to handle the sharp decline of both the ANC and Swapo to worry about a river.
Instead of asserting our own lane, what do we do? On Wednesday, the Bank of Namibia stepped up to the microphone to do what it does best: copy Pretoria’s homework.
The Monetary Policy Committee met on 15 and 16 June and decided to hike the repo rate to 6.75%.
Why? To safeguard the peg between the Namibia dollar and the South African rand.
Because of rising inflation, higher fuel costs, and South Africa’s own interest rate increase, our policymakers had no choice but to squeeze us even tighter.
The sad comedy of it all is that our central bank has little to no room to move.
We are a small open economy, highly vulnerable to external shocks, and our historic ties mean that major financial decisions are basically made for us in Pretoria.
But what is truly is that in the few areas where we actually have the power to make our own choices, we consciously decide to punish the already struggling Namibian taxpayer.
We are squeezed from the south by a collapsing giant, and then we get squeezed from within by our own leaders.
It’s an extreme sport just trying to survive on a Namibian salary when you’re paying South African prices for independence.
We really need to start manufacturing our own toothpicks and toilet paper before Pretoria decides to pull the plug.
– News always deals with serious matters. Here we give you the other side.
The post Namibia Still Pays Pretoria for Permission to Breathe appeared first on The Namibian.
