Five Piles of Buried Value Still Waiting to Be Mined.
By Stanley Nick Katzao. *
Madam President, at the National Fisheries Indaba last week, you shared a powerful lesson from Namibia’s mining sector. You noted that a surprising share of a mine’s true wealth is not found in the ore shipped out, but in the heaps left behind. These dumps and tailings, once abandoned as waste, can yield immense value upon a careful second pass. You then asked the delegates a fair question: Does our fishing industry have heaps too?
It does, Madam President. I have identified five of them, and I want to answer you directly.
The Anatomy of a Fishing Heap:
A mine leaves a heap because the easiest value was extracted while the rest was left on the ground. Our fishing industry operates on a structurally identical premise. It pulls out the value that is easiest to count — boasting N$14.3 billion in annual export earnings, a 4.1% contribution to GDP, and over 21,000 direct jobs — and stops there.
But Article 100 of our Constitution dictates that the fish in our waters belong to the State. In our republic, the “State” is not a corporate abstraction. It is the collective sovereigns: every single Namibian citizen.
Because the government cannot fish on behalf of three million people, it appoints private entities as caretakers to exploit this resource in trust. That sacred trust is not satisfied by glowing export statistics. It is only honoured when the wealth pulled from our cold Atlantic waters filters back to the actual owners. It must manifest as dignified jobs, fair taxes, food on local tables, youth ownership, and durable infrastructure.
Wherever that filtering-down fails to happen, valuable ore is left rotting in a heap beside the industry. Here are the five heaps currently waiting to be mined.
1. The “Dignified Employment” Heap: Scaling the Economic Multiplier:
The state rightly counts employment as a return on our sovereign trust. On paper, the existing employment creation policies have successfully driven local processing. Most established fishing companies comply with baseline minimum standards, frequently paying entry wages above minimum rates.
However, the real structural value remains buried. The true return on labour is not measured by basic compliance, but by the macroeconomic knock-on effects within our ecosystem. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has demonstrated that one high-quality, permanent fishing job creates four other indirect jobs in the local economy by fuelling domestic manufacturing, packaging, cold-chain logistics, and retail. Temporary, insecure, or low-growth jobs fail to activate this powerful engine. We must evaluate right holders not merely by the quantity of people on their payrolls, but by the structural stability required to unlock this 1:4 economic multiplier for Namibians.
2. The “Tax Compliance” Heap: Unmasking the 25% Scandal:
The most damning slide at this Indaba exposed a massive structural heap: a mere 25% of our fishing right holders pay corporate tax. While this figure awaits an independent audit, it mirrors a historic reality. The Namibia Revenue Authority (NamRA) has openly categorized fishing among the lowest contributors to the national fiscus, historically supplying between 2% and 12% of tax revenue despite billions in export value.
This is an entirely untenable situation. Fishing rights and quotas are handed out by the state for free. Unlike manufacturing or agriculture, right holders in this industry do not have to purchase, farm, or manufacture their raw materials; nature provides them at zero cost. There is absolutely no legitimate excuse for 75% of right holders to claim they cannot turn a taxable profit. If a company cannot make a profit out of a premium resource they receive for free, they simply do not have what it takes to exploit these commercial rights efficiently and effectively. Non-payment of tax shouldn’t just be viewed as an accounting issue; it should be seen as proof of operational incompetence, rendering such companies unfit to hold a sovereign asset in trust.
3. The “Nutritional Access” Heap: The National Consumption Gap:
This heap has been partially turned over, and it is only fair to acknowledge the progress. Namibia’s per capita fish consumption has risen from a dismal 4kg at Independence to roughly 18.5kg today, driven largely by the Government’s efforts through the Fish Consumption Trust, – subsidized fish shops owned mostly by fishing operators and owners of large processing facilities, as well as market obligations.
Yet, the global average sits above 21kg. It remains quietly embarrassing that a premier global fish-producing nation eats less of its own ocean bounty than the rest of the world eats of theirs. This is fundamentally an issue of access and affordability. At the Indaba, one youth delegate poignantly summed up this disconnect, stating: “I want to feel, touch, see, smell, and hear my fish. I want to see it on my plate.”
Those raw words slice through all the high-level industry statistics. Sovereignty cannot be eaten; local access can. Real ownership is measured by whether our marine resources are physically reachable for a mother in Katutura or a child in Rundu, rather than being neatly packed away for export to Europe and Asia.
4. The “Enterprise Development” Heap: Realizing Generational Value Today:
True enterprise development requires a profound shift in how we view our youth. We should not only exploit our fishing resources on a sustainable basis for tomorrow, but also in such a structural way that our young people can derive real, commercial benefits right now. We cannot expect the youth to sit on the sidelines waiting until “their time has arrived” — they need access today, not only after we are done.
True enterprise development does not mean hiring a young Namibian to be a driver or a deckhand; it means financing them to become independent commercial actors. This is not a utopian theory; we have a proven, local blueprint for it. Roughly eight years ago at Paragon Seafood Products, we intentionally converted our wet and freezer quotas into developing local value-added consumer products — producing a 1kg frozen consumer pack and canned horse mackerel under the Tjao brand specifically for domestic consumption.
To power this, we designed an ingenious youth enterprise development model: we provided young Namibians with branded, large display freezers on loan and supplied them with consumer-ready frozen and canned products to launch their own fish-trading businesses. We delivered the fish to them free of charge and handled marketing free of charge, shifting them from passive job-seekers into real asset owners. If this model were mandated across the entire multi-billion-dollar industry, this heap alone would seed a generation of true Namibian entrepreneurs today.
5. The “Structural Legacy” Heap: Redefining Corporate Social Investment (CSI):
Corporate Social Investment (CSI) is treated as a major criterion for quota allocation. A few exemplary actors demonstrate what real investment looks like; for instance, Erongo Marine and Merlus’s worker trusts grant actual equity and pay real dividends, bypassing the trap of corporate paternalism.
But broader sector research paints a bleaker picture: 82% of community beneficiaries receive a donation only once — usually canned fish or clothing during an emergency. Even a former Minister of Fisheries criticized the industry’s social contributions as “insignificant” compared to the grand promises made during quota applications. Properly directed, this heap should be building durable schools, clinics, and solar-powered boreholes, rather than handing out short-term charity that vanishes the moment it is consumed.
The collective sovereigns do not want public relations photo-ops; they want to see these CSI interventions change their lives in tangible, visible, and dignified ways.
The Tool to Mine the Tailings:
Madam President, these five heaps are real, but fortunately, the tool to mine them already exists. Unlocking this trapped value requires no new legislation. The Marine Resources Act already empowers the minister to gazette binding conditions on any right, and explicitly allows for the suspension or cancellation of quotas due to non-compliance.
In direct response to the question you put to the Indaba, I am asking that these five heaps be treated exactly how a serious mining engineer treats a tailings dump. They must be precisely defined, quantified, independently audited, and religiously enforced.
These metrics must be written into the uncompromisable criteria for granting and renewing every single fishing right and quota. A caretaker company should not retain access to a sovereign national resource while leaving its heap of moral obligations to the public unmined. If we enforce this scorecard, we can stop simply admiring the export figures at the top of the pile, and finally go back for the wealth we left sitting on the ground.
* Stanley Nick Katzao is a business leader and was a panellist at the National Fisheries Indaba 2026 in Walvis Bay.
