Just weeks before international media reports began singling out Namibia as the likely next global ‘big deal’ in the oil and gas sector, reports of an intervention by Brazil to boost food access for the vulnerable Southern African state was appearing in sections of the international media. The recent report alluding to Brazil’s positive response to a United Nations World Food Programme appeal to enhance food accessibility and alleviate malnutrition in five regions of Namibia come on the heels of a story published in the Friday September 1 issue of the Stabroek Business alluding to a report that had referred to Namibia as the ‘new Guyana’ on account of the attention that the country has been attracting on account of its recent “huge oil finds.”
It is, however, not uncommon for it to take considerable periods, decades in instances like Guyana’s, for oil to be, first, accessed, and afterwards transformed into tangible economic assets. So that while some of the world’s major oil companies are busy seeking to monetize Namibia’s oil resources, a protracted history of poverty and its concomitants continues to hang over large geographic areas of the southern African state. Earlier this month, while the political administration in the country’s capital, Windhoek, was focusing attention on a likely ‘rags to riches’ story, the Lula Da Silva administration in Brazil was disclosing that it had “generously donated” an amount of US$120,000.00 to the United Nations World Food Pro-gramme (WFP) in Namibia, an intervention that seeks to “enhance food accessibility and alleviate malnutrition in five regions of the country.” The report says that “the funds arrive[d] at a critical juncture, when Namibia grapples with the enduring consequences of drought, soaring food costs, and the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
It added that the allocated resources will be utilized “to establish robust food systems within communities, schools, and health centres,” specifically in those regions of the country that had been hardest hit by food scarcity and it effects. While the Namibian government is forced to seek external help to bring life-saving relief to parts of the country’s capital, the state authorities are no less preoccupied with the anticipated oil windfall which, down the road, can do much more than simply remove the country from reliance on external food aid. Namibia’s is a story which, in some respects, resembles Guyana’s. Namibia’s known energy assets reportedly amount to more than 11 billion barrels of oil and 2.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, notwithstanding which, much of the country’s hydrocarbon potential has remained largely untapped over the years. Oil industry experts believe that Namibia’s energy reserves represents one of the “final frontiers” for oil and gas exploration worldwide,” hence the race by some of the world’s leading oil companies to ‘mark their names’ on the country’s oil resources.
For all this, generations of Namibians have known nothing but poverty. These days, the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia has reportedly been busy engaging some of the big names in the global oil industry including Shell Namibia Upstream B.V, Qatar Energy, Reconnaissance Energy Africa (Canada), ExxonMobil, Eco Atlantic, TotalEnergies and Africa Energy Corp. The portents would appear to point to a life-changing experience for the poverty-ridden African state. Elsewhere, the developing and underdeveloped and developing world, resource-rich but substantively poverty stricken countries eagerly await the realization of the kind of economic miracle that can materialize out of tapping into natural resource wealth that has long eluded their grasp. Radical Changes in countries’ fortunes, these days, can be, in some circumstances a matter of no more than the luck of the draw.
