Will Namibia Pursue the Singapore or the SA Model?
Last week, i sat on a panel at an investors’ conference at Swakopmund. The topic was ‘Making Namibia the Singapore of Africa’. The energy in the room was something I have not felt at a South African investor conference in years: it was optimistic rather than resigned, filled with a sense of possibility rather than […] The post Will Namibia Pursue the Singapore or the SA Model? appeared first on The Namibian.
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Last week, i sat on a panel at an investors’ conference at Swakopmund. The topic was ‘Making Namibia the Singapore of Africa’.
The energy in the room was something I have not felt at a South African investor conference in years: it was optimistic rather than resigned, filled with a sense of possibility rather than focused on mitigating damage as so many business conversations in South Africa are.
One of the reasons for the optimism is that Namibia is about to come into potentially transformative resource wealth in the form of offshore oil and gas, as well as minerals.
This is both an opportunity and a trap.
Managed well, these revenues can fund productivity-enhancing investments in education, infrastructure, and institutions.
Managed badly, they turn into the resource curse that has blighted Angola, Nigeria and Venezuela – and many other countries.
WEEP NOT MY COUNTRY
As Namibia decides its development path, it has a choice of templates from which to take inspiration.
The model picked by its neighbour, South Africa, is available. It is based on race-based empowerment, cadre deployment, and state entities as patronage vehicles.
It is already partially embedded in Namibia.
Singapore offers an alternative model, based on strict meritocracy, openness to investment, clean governance, and pragmatism over dogmatism.
Singapore had an inauspicious start. In 1965, it was expelled from the Malaysian federation.
Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s first leader, wept on television.
The country he was left with was smaller than many Namibian farms, had no natural resources, unemployment of 14%, and a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of about US$500, comparable to South Africa at the time.
Contrast that with today. Singapore’s GDP per capita is now roughly US$100 000 (about N$1.6 million) in 2025, or more than 14 times that of South Africa (projected at about US$6 800 (about N$112 165) by the International Monetary Fund.
That transformation took 60 years and was the result not of luck, but of good choices and consistent execution of those choices.
ASIAN COMPARISONS
When Singapore separated from Malaysia, both countries faced the same question: how to build prosperity in a multiracial society.
Malaysia answered by introducing the New Economic Policy in 1971, creating preferential treatment for ethnic Malays in education, employment, and business.
South Africa introduced broad-based black economic empowerment along similar lines three decades later.
Singapore took a different path. It rejected racial preference outright, insisted on meritocracy, and appointed people on the basis of competence.
Today, Singapore is one of the richest and best-governed countries on earth, while Malaysia, with a GDP per capita of around US$14 000 (about N$230 927), is middle-income and continues to wrestle with the distortions its race-based policies created.
SOUTH AFRICA
Now look at South Africa. Its unemployment rate is above 30%.
According to the World Bank, South Africa’s GDP per capita has stagnated for nearly two decades in real terms, using constant 2015 United States dollar adjusted for inflation: it stood at about US$5 890 in 2007, peaked at US$6 170 in 2013, and is now around US$5 715 (2024), with little improvement expected in 2025.
The country is steadily losing skilled people and the African National Congress government has systematically degraded the institutions it needed most by filling them with party loyalists rather than professionals.
Lee Kuan would have found this incomprehensible. He paid civil servants competitive salaries and prosecuted the corrupt regardless of their political connections.
His principle was simple: you cannot build a country on rewarded incompetence.
RIGHT CHOICES
South Africa had every advantage Singapore lacked. Minerals, arable land, a large domestic market, an established industrial base, world class universities, deep capital markets.
It has spent almost two decades making itself progressively poorer. Singapore had none of those things and built prosperity anyway.
The conference at Swakopmund felt like a place where that prosperity is still imaginable. It is within reach if Namibia makes the right choices.
- John Endres is the chief executive of the South African Institute of Race Relations.
The post Will Namibia Pursue the Singapore or the SA Model? appeared first on The Namibian.
