Housing in Namibia needs serviced land, not just loans

LAZARUS KWEDHI WRITES:

On 31 March 2026, the Presidential Task Force on Land, Housing and Sanitation submitted its report to President Netumbo Nandi-Ndeitwah. 

After months of consultations and the commitment of state resources, its housing recommendations sound familiar: establish a Mortgage Bank, support NHE, strengthen Build Together, promote Alternative Building Technologies, and scale up PPPs and employer housing schemes.

The recommendations are disappointing. Instead of providing alternative solutions, they reproduce the current housing crisis in a different shape, but with the same taste.

On paper, it looks like action. On the ground, it feels like “new packaging, same players”. The Task Force fails to grasp the true intention of our current housing legal frameworks and the primary mandate of the institutions responsible for financing urban serviced land. As a result, it fails to harmonise the relationship among all key stakeholders to address the housing needs of employees, employers and the general public – specifically, accessibility and affordability of serviced land ownership and the right to build houses of their choice.

Namibia’s housing crisis is not a mystery. It is a crisis of serviced land and finance. It is also a myth peddled by politicians into the public mind: that we must place our faith in government to build houses for us.

The ideal is simple. Allocate serviced land to municipal residents for residential purposes, and thereafter let them build their own houses. That is why people in rural villages do not complain about a lack of housing or land from the Omukwaniilwa and Chiefs. Until we address who currently controls land and who pays for it – against who is supposed to control and finance urban serviced land – we will keep recycling the same failed model and call it TaskForce recommendations presented in different grammar.

The Core Problem: Serviced Land, Not Bricks

The mandate to provide serviced land lies with Government and Local Authorities under the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development. That is the law. But in practice, LAs and NHE have deserted and outsourced this core mandate. They have failed to build the required human capital capacity and to make the financial commitment. Then they pretend to lack capital and capacity to service land, intentionally, to pave the way for PPPs, property developers, and commercial banks.

The developer adds profit. The bank adds interest and risk. A plot that costs N$45,000 to service with water, sewer and roads ends up costing the citizen N$180,000 before a single brick is laid.

This is why houses are unaffordable. The problem is not construction, nor a lack of legal frameworks, institutions, town planners, engineers and surveyors, or a lack of employer housing subsidy. The fundamental problem is that we have allowed profit to be inserted into the servicing of land – a core public function. The government has run away from its primary responsibility to ensure that every Namibian family has decent shelter. Simply because public servants and office bearers have chosen to commercialise and commodify housing as a basic need, and opted to do private business using entrusted public power and office.

PPP: A Political Vehicle, Not A Solution

The TaskForce places heavy emphasis on PPPs. In Namibia, PPPs have become a vehicle for dishing out urban land and construction tenders to politically-connected developers and tenderpreneurs. They buy urban land below market value, secure tenders to service the land or construct houses at inflated prices, and often deliver substandard work.

It keeps debt off the government's books but pushes the risk and cost onto the homeowner. The citizen ends up paying for the land, the developer’s margin, the bank’s interest, and municipal services – all from a salary that barely covers groceries.

To say “government has no money” is a fallacy. If the private sector has capital and capacity to service urban land and construct houses that government does not have, then it is an insult to the sovereign state. It is an indication of serious problems in financial management, investment priorities, and organisational development of state governance. Servicing land is not consumption. It is infrastructure that creates ratepayers and drives economic growth.

Two Gaps the TaskForce Ignored

First: ABTs without finance. The report promotes Alternative Building Technologies without asking two basic questions: what is wrong with the current building code, and will commercial banks actually finance ABTs? Today, banks still reject non-brick houses or require a 40% deposit. A standard without bank accreditation is meaningless. This model is not different from communal land occupation, where one cannot secure a loan from a commercial bank.

Second: Designs that ignore culture. The standard 1- or 2-bedroom house on a 300 sqm erf promoted by NHE, Build Together, or the Shack Dwellers Federation does not fit the way Namibians live. Our extended family structure requires, at minimum, a parents’ room, a boys’ room, a girls’ room, and a guest room or Ondjugo. That is about dignity, privacy and hospitality. With current designs, we are not upholding our constitutional values. We are eroding them.

An Alternative: Return Housing to the Public

We need a different model. One that returns housing to its constitutional purpose: a government responsibility to deliver serviced urban land through Local Authorities, whereby:

1. Government directly funds land servicing at Local Authority level, through the LAs themselves or NHE. No intermediary in urban land servicing.

2. Allocate land at cost-recovery. LAs should sell serviced plots at service cost plus a small admin fee, not at market price, to employees, employers and the general public for residential purposes.

3. Give citizens choice. Once a person has title, let them choose any bank, NHE, Build Together, or self-fund to build their preferred house, in line with municipal building standards and with consideration for the rights of extended families. The rationale is to break the current monopoly in the housing market held by banks, property developers, and PPPs promoted by politicians seeking to finance political campaigns and re-election.

4. Design for our culture. Adopt a 4 to 5-bedroom typology on 600-700sqm erfs to accommodate extended families’ rights to culture, privacy and dignity.

5. Accredit ABTs for finance. Government, banks and NCR must approve ABT systems before rollout so people can actually get bonds.

6. Make it affordable to keep. Introduce rebates on rates and basic services for pensioners, unemployed and low-income households. Stop auctioning homes for municipal debt. 

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