Office extract for citation on panduleniitula.com (draft). Ligature and line-break cleanup only. Media-inquiry footers and party profile copy from the PDF are not reprinted. Some office PDFs print Independence Patriots or Leader of the Official Opposition; this site keeps Independent Patriots for Change and does not treat the opposition-leader heading as a finding. This extract is the office wording, not a finding of this site.

Filename as supplied: PRESIDENT'S SPEECH_EU.pdf (duplicate of PRESIDENTS_SPEECH.pdf)
CLOSING REMARKS DELIVERED BY DR. PANDULENI ITULA ON
THE OCCASION OF THE CLOSING SESSION OF THE 2ND
NAMIBIA–EU BUSINESS FORUM

Wednesday, 13 May 2026, Windhoek

1. Your Excellency the Vice-President, Honourable Ambassador Martins, Honourable
Ministers, distinguished delegates from the European Union and from across our
beloved Namibia, business leaders, members of the press, ladies and gentlemen.

2. The 2nd Namibia–EU Business Forum is not a partisan occasion, It is a national one.
And the words I bring to this closing session are offered in that spirit, as the
contribution of the President of the Independent Patriots for Change, the official
opposition, to a conversation that belongs to all of us and to the generations that will
inherit the choices we make.

3. This Forum has been a serious and substantial undertaking. The Government, led by
Ambassador Kaire Mbuende, deserves the recognition of the country. The European
Union, through Ambassador Martins and the Team Europe delegation, has
demonstrated that Namibia matters to the partnership in a way that few small
economies enjoy. The extension of the Strategic Partnership Roadmap to 2030 is a
meaningful horizon. The framing of up to €20 billion in private investment
leverageable through the Global Gateway is a bold ambition. The presentation of 30
bankable Namibian projects is the kind of pipeline-building work that produces real
investment if we now collectively follow through on it.

4. Before I dwell on the substance of the three days, I want to name something that
often goes unsaid at gatherings of this kind, because it is the foundation on which
every figure on every slide we have seen this week ultimately rests. Political stability
is the first ingredient of investor confidence. Without it, the €20 billion is theoretical,
the 30 projects are theoretical, and the Strategic Partnership Roadmap is theoretical.
With it, every figure becomes a foundation on which capital can be committed and
architecture can be built. Namibia has, in the thirty-six years since independence,
maintained a quality of political stability that across our continent is the exception
rather than the rule. We have transferred power peacefully across multiple
administrations. We have, even when we have disagreed sharply, kept our
disagreements within the institutions the Constitution established for them. That
stability is the precondition of everything we are discussing this week, and it is worth
naming, because it was earned by Namibians and it is sustained by Namibians, of
every political affiliation.

5. I want to extend that point one step further. The harmony in this country between the
ruling party and the opposition, a harmony that allows the official opposition to sit in
this Forum, to listen to investors, to engage with the European Union, and to offer
constructive contribution at the closing session is, in the African context, rare. It is
not perfect but It is real.

6. Namibia is one of the few countries on this continent where the leader of an
opposition party stands at a podium in a national forum and the room expects him to
contribute, not to disrupt. That expectation is itself an investment asset. Investors
who place capital in Namibia are placing it in a political culture that has, over three
and a half decades, built habits of institutional cooperation. The Government of the
Republic of Namibia deserves credit for sustaining that culture. So does the official
opposition. So does every party that has competed within our democratic system
without resort to the destabilising tactics that have damaged investor confidence
elsewhere on the continent.

7. I want to dwell on the phrase “follow through” because it is the work that begins when
this Forum ends. For three days now we have heard speeches. We have heard from
the Ministry of International Relations and Trade, whose Executive Director Ms
Nghipondoka-Robiati gave us the most candid statement of our country’s structural
constraints we have heard from a senior civil servant in years. She named four,
limited domestic market, high transportation costs, high energy costs, and a
shortage of skilled labour, and she named them in front of European investors with
the cameras running. That kind of institutional honesty is the foundation on which
serious reform is built, and we acknowledge it.

8. We have heard from the Namibia Investment Promotion and Development Board,
which described its operating model with admirable clarity. The agency, in its own
words, exists to walk investors through the regulatory zigzag of getting things done in
this country. The metaphor used was that it is never a straight road, that it is a zigzag
route, but that NIPDB will get you there. I want to honour the work the women and
men of NIPDB do, because it is genuine and it is needed. But I also want to say, with
respect, that an investment-promotion agency whose primary function is to navigate
around the dysfunction of line ministries is a workaround, not a solution.

9. In Botswana, in Rwanda, in Mauritius, investment-promotion agencies sit alongside
functional regulators. The agency markets; the regulator processes. In our case, the
agency has been asked to substitute for ministries that should be processing
applications at the speed investors require. NIPDB is doing its job. The country owes
it to NIPDB to fix the upstream problem that creates the need for the workaround in
the first place.

10. We have heard from MeatCo, whose presentation contained two slides that, placed
side by side, told the story of Namibian trade strategy more honestly than any speech
could. The first slide celebrated our country’s preferential market access to four
major destinations, the European Union, the United States, China, and Norway. The
second slide showed where our beef actually goes. The European Union takes
80.74%. Norway takes 9.67%. China takes 1.15%. The United States, with which we
share a preferential access regime, has taken no commercial Namibian beef since
2020. We have, as a country, four certificates on the wall and one customer at the
counter. That is not a partisan observation, it is a slide MeatCo itself put up and it is
the diagnostic moment from which our next phase of trade policy must begin.

11. We have heard from Mr Daniel Hooft of Kelp Blue, whose presentation gave us the
most concrete case study of the gap between Namibia’s potential and its
institutional delivery that this Forum produced. The Ministry of Environment
processed his environmental clearance in five months. The Ministry of Fisheries
processed his aquaculture licence in four months. A third ministry has not yet
processed an application that has been with it for five years. Mr Hooft did not come
to this Forum to attack our country. He came, despite everything, to say that he
remains committed to building in Namibia. We owe him, and we owe every investor
watching, the assurance that the institutional consistency he has not received from
one ministry is the standard we now intend to apply across all of them.

12. We have heard, in the EUDR Masterclass on Wednesday morning, from Mr Antoine
Hashuin of DG Environment. He told us with characteristic precision that
certification does not equal compliance that there is no direct green lane, only
correlation and not causation. That candour is welcome. It also tells us that the
European Union’s own regulators are still resolving how their flagship deforestation
regulation will treat Namibian beef, charcoal, and the producers in our communal
areas who have neither the infrastructure for plot-level geolocation nor the legal
clarity to know what they are being asked to comply with.

13. I want to make one observation about the architecture of this Forum itself, offered in
the same spirit of constructive contribution. The official opposition’s engagement in
gatherings of this kind benefits the country in two ways that I do not believe are
always fully appreciated. First, when the opposition is present in the rooms where
investors are present, the opposition develops the same understanding of what
investors actually need that the Government develops, which means that when
matters come before the National Assembly, the opposition is in a position to
scrutinise on the basis of shared facts rather than presumed ones.

14. Second, when investors see that the official opposition is in the room, they
understand that the country’s political system is not built around a single party’s
continued tenure, which is itself a measure of stability they price into their decisions.
I would respectfully invite the Government to consider, in the planning of future
forums, a more systematic engagement of the official opposition in the architecture
of these events not as a courtesy, but as a contribution to the very investor
confidence the forums are designed to build.

15. So here is what I will say, in the spirit of the partnership and in the service of the
country. The Forum has produced a horizon. The work of converting that horizon into
architecture belongs to the next eighteen months. In that work, the Government will
lead. The opposition will engage. Civil society will scrutinise. The European Union will
partner. And the Namibian people, the workers in Lüderitz harbour, the small farmers
in Kavango, the unemployed young people in Katutura will judge us not by what we
projected on these screens but by what arrives in their lives.

16. I therefore put three matters on the public record before this Forum closes.

a. First, the €20 billion deserves disaggregation. Grant, concessional debt,
commercial debt, and equity are different categories of capital with
different implications for Namibian fiscal sovereignty. Let the next public
document of the Strategic Partnership set out, by category, what fraction of
that figure is committed at which stage.

b. Second, the 30 projects belong to the Namibian people. Let them be tabled
in the National Assembly, with beneficial-ownership disclosure,
employment projections, and the parliamentary ratification pathway
publicly stated. The opposition will not oppose projects that serve the
country. We will scrutinise them in the constitutional venue.

c. Third, the legislative architecture that should accompany this partnership,
the Petroleum Amendment Bill that captures rents for the Welwitschia
Fund, the Investment Promotion and Facilitation Bill that conditions
priority handling, the Fertilisers and Pesticides Bills that retire the 1947
statute under which Mr Hooft has had to fight, the Forest Act amendment
that supports our EUDR negotiation, is the work the National Assembly
must do in the next twelve to eighteen months. We extend, in the national
interest, the cooperation of the official opposition to that work. Bring us the
Bills. Engage civil society in their drafting. Engage the Namibia Chamber of
Commerce, the Trade Union Confederations, the conservancies in the

regions where these projects will land. The country is stronger when its
institutions consult before they legislate.

17. Honourable Ambassador, the partnership we celebrate today is mature enough to
bear an honest conversation. Namibia welcomes European capital. We are also a
country with strategic supply assets the European Union needs for its own transition.
The next round of conversations between our two regions can be a partnership of
equals on the questions that matter most, the carbon-border adjustment, the
deforestation regulation, the local-content thresholds, the value-addition
schedules, the mobility of our skilled workers into your markets. Let the next Forum,
in 2027 or 2028, be the one at which those reciprocal asks are tabled and answered.

We thank the Government for the work of these three days. We thank the European Union
for its serious engagement. We invite civil society to occupy the role the Constitution
gives it and commit, as the Independent Patriots for Change, to a future in which the next
generation of Namibians inherits not a celebration of partnership but the institutional
architecture that converted partnership into prosperity.

Namibia is all we have. Namibia is not for sale. And Namibia, working together,
Government, opposition, civil society, and the partners who believe in us can build the
country that this Forum has begun to imagine.

I thank you.