By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 06

The same waters that may hold Namibia's oil already feed its second-largest export sector. Two food-and-fuel economies now overlap.

The Venus discovery sits in one of the most productive marine systems on earth. The Orange Basin lies under the Benguela upwelling, a cold, nutrient-rich current that makes Namibian waters among the best fishing grounds in the world. When TotalEnergies announced its February 2022 find, it placed a future oil province directly over an established fishing one.

That overlap is a food-systems question before it is an energy one. The catch is not a legacy industry waiting to be replaced; it is a working part of the national diet and export base that the new oil activity has to share a sea with.

A fishery that already earns its keep

Namibia’s marine fisheries are no small thing to put at risk. The sector lands around 550,000 tonnes a year, worth roughly N$10 billion (about US$800 million), contributes some 3.5 per cent of GDP and employs close to 16,800 people, ranking Namibia third in Africa for marine capture. It is the country’s second-largest export earner after mining.

These are the numbers that give the fishery standing in any trade-off with oil. A sector of that scale is not an obstacle to development; it is a food and employment base whose value is proven, present and annual, against oil revenue that is neither yet.

The catch already pays every year; the oil has not paid once.

Where the two economies collide

The tension is physical, and it starts before any oil flows. Finding and appraising deepwater discoveries relies on seismic surveys, in which airgun arrays fire loud low-frequency pulses through the water for months at a time. In a system where sound carries far, that noise reaches the same waters the fishery and its food chain depend on.

The Benguela supports a dense web of marine life, including dozens of whale and dolphin species that use sound to feed and navigate. Where intensive surveying and rich fishing grounds occupy the same sea, the collision is not hypothetical – it is a question of timing, mitigation and management.

Oil is found with noise, and noise travels through the food chain that noise disturbs.

Managing a shared, cross-border sea

The Benguela does not belong to Namibia alone. It is a single large marine ecosystem shared with Angola and South Africa and governed jointly through the Benguela Current Convention, an intergovernmental body the three states created to coordinate its conservation and use. Oil activity in Namibian waters therefore lands inside an existing regional stewardship frame.

That frame is the practical safeguard. Whether Venus and the fishery coexist depends less on goodwill than on how surveying seasons, exclusion areas and monitoring are set and enforced across a border that fish and whales cross freely.

A shared ecosystem needs shared rules; the fish and the oil do not respect the border.

The sustainability bet

The measured position is that oil and the fishery can share the Benguela only if the fishery is treated as a permanent asset, not a transitional one. Oil is a finite, decades-long resource; a well-managed fishery is renewable and, in principle, forever. Trading a perpetual food source for a temporary revenue stream would be a poor exchange for a coastal nation.

The risk is that the excitement of a large discovery quietly reorders priorities, and surveying convenience is allowed to erode the productivity of the sea. Balance, not sequence, is the sustainable target – keeping the fishery whole while the oil is explored.

The oil is finite and the fishery is not, which settles which one must be protected first.

For a fisheries operator, a regulator or anyone working in coastal food systems, Venus marks the moment two sea-based economies began to overlap in Namibian waters. The decision it forces in 2022 is how to protect a proven, renewable fishery worth N$10 billion a year while a finite oil province is explored over it – and who writes the rules that keep both alive.

Sources: TotalEnergies press release; Benguela Current Convention – Ecosystem Advisory; Marine life facing the wave of Namibia’s oil boom (Conservation Namibia)