KEY POINTS
- Namibia President Nandi-Ndaitwah has secured Norwegian technical expertise to develop the country’s oil and gas sector.
- A Norwegian expert who helped draft Namibia’s 1992 Petroleum Act is now advising the country’s oil unit.
- The president is calling on parliament to urgently pass the petroleum amendment bill without further delays.
Namibia is building its oil sector one expert at a time, and it has gone back to one of the oldest relationships in its petroleum history to do it.
President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah confirmed during a State of the Nation address that her government has secured technical support from Norway to help develop Namibia’s upstream oil and gas sector. A Norwegian expert who was part of the team that originally drafted Namibia’s Petroleum Act of 1992 visited the country for a week last month and is now actively working with the oil unit established under the presidency.
The move reflects Namibia’s awareness of how much it still needs to build before it can manage a commercial oil industry at scale. The country has benchmarked its approach against Guyana, Angola, Norway and Algeria, studying how those nations structured governance, policy and sector oversight in the early years of production.
The bill parliament needs to pass
Nandi-Ndaitwah used her address to press parliament directly. She wants the petroleum amendment bill passed with urgency, warning that one year has already been lost to delays. The bill, once passed, will formally approve her control over upstream oil and gas operations through the presidential oil unit.
“I am calling on parliament to join me in this effort. The first step is to pass the petroleum amendment bill with urgency, as one year has already been lost,” she said.
The unit is already active. It is reviewing the first batch of Field Development Plans submitted by TotalEnergies, a critical step toward formal negotiations and eventual final investment decisions on the Venus deepwater project. A technical committee guided by a ministerial team is leading that assessment process.
What is at stake
Namibia’s oil opportunity is significant. TotalEnergies and Norway’s BW Energy are both expected to make final investment decisions on their respective Namibian projects by late 2026. If those decisions go ahead, the economic impact could be transformative, with projections suggesting Namibia’s GDP could double by 2040 if offshore oil proves commercially viable at scale.
The government has also completed regional consultations on a local content policy designed to maximize Namibian participation in the sector. The next step is legislative review before the policy goes to parliament.
Affirmative Repositioning parliamentarian Job Amupanda acknowledged the momentum, saying the appointment of a minister in the Office of the President resolved about 30 percent of his party’s concerns about the new petroleum framework. The remaining 70 percent, he said, will need to be worked through between parliament and the presidency.
