Good English vs Poor Housing Policy
Is comrade Prime Minister auditioning for a standup comedy gig? It would be a welcome addition to the already sterling online influencer efforts of Namibia’s eighth administration. Our leaders are still comfortably sleeping in the warm embrace of the free market, expecting big business to suddenly develop a pro-poor conscience and for their moolah to […] The post Good English vs Poor Housing Policy appeared first on The Namibian.
Black News 
Is comrade Prime Minister auditioning for a standup comedy gig?
It would be a welcome addition to the already sterling online influencer efforts of Namibia’s eighth administration.
Our leaders are still comfortably sleeping in the warm embrace of the free market, expecting big business to suddenly develop a pro-poor conscience and for their moolah to miraculously trickle down to the kapana stalls.
This week, we watched the PM’s office clearly baffled by how the system he protects actually operates. Imagine thinking the solution to a 36-year streak of consistent national housing blunders is to ask commercial banks to be slightly nicer.
Prime minister Elijah Ngurare complained that a N$2-million house takes 20 years to pay off, while a luxury vehicle takes only five.
Grootman boldly declared that no amount of good English would convince him why this is the case. It is truly comforting to know that our executive branch is being completely outsmarted by a standard amortisation table.
Namibia’s housing backlog is estimated at over 300 000 units, driven by urbanisation and the inability of the ultra low-income majority to qualify for traditional bank mortgages.
Instead of implementing serious reforms and state-backed housing initiatives to fix the crisis, our leaders are begging the Bank of Namibia (BoN) to talk to commercial banks to please alter their money-making ways.
They genuinely believe that if they just speak nicely to their banker friends, they will suddenly slash interest rates out of pure patriotism.
Etse?
The classic Namibian strategy of creating a new task force ‘to look into’ a catastrophic systemic failure and drinking bottled water will not work this time around.
Then came the inevitable corporate intervention from the banking elite, calmly explaining that long-term debt is actually a beautiful gift to the public. We are told that 20-year bonds are not a debt trap, but rather a generous mechanism designed to give families room to breathe.
This corporate logic treats the intersection of starvation wages and astronomical property prices as an unchangeable law of nature. They tell us the problem is supply, land costs, and infrastructure, completely bypassing the glaring truth that housing in this country is a playground for speculative capital.
The market does not care about the United Nations criteria for adequate housing: security of tenure, habitability, or human dignity.
The market wants to draw blood from a rock, and our government is happily handing them the cup.
According to BoN’s annual report, commercial banks collectively earned about N$15.9 billion last year – 10% more than N$14.5 billion in 2024.
For any Namibian to afford the average price of a N$1.4-million house, they need to be earning N$30 000 or more per month, but the average salary of working Namibians is N$5 000 or less.
BoN governor Ebson Uanguta poetically described the process of reducing high banking fees as a journey that will take time.
While our politicians are speaking grand English at Windhoek workshops, the working class is trapped in a system where a tiny elite gets filthy rich off land speculation while the majority are hopelessly priced out of the market.
And the state behaves as if there are no alternative blueprints where housing is treated as a fundamental right rather than a commercial gamble.
Vienna builds municipal housing to keep rents low, Finland actively eradicates homelessness by giving people unconditional shelter, and capitalist poster child Singapore tightly controls land to house its citizens.
Until we stop treating shelter as a money-making racket and start treating it as a basic human right, our housing policy will remain discarded material for a Free-Your-Mind comedy festival.
– News always deals with serious matters. Here we give you the other side.
The post Good English vs Poor Housing Policy appeared first on The Namibian.
