By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 02
A record year is announced by a chamber but delivered by a handful of operators on a few sites.
A national mining figure is a sum of individual operations, and Namibia’s 2025 result was delivered by a short list of them. The record that uranium and gold carried was produced by a handful of mines and the people who run them, not by a market abstraction, and the profile that matters is of the operators who actually moved the tonnes.
The public voice of the year was the Chamber of Mines, whose chief executive, Veston Malango, has led the body for two decades, with George Botshiwe serving as its president. But the Chamber reports the sector; it does not run it. The operators sit on the mines themselves, and it is their calls that turned firm prices into the output Namibia banked.
The uranium operators who set the pace
The uranium growth that led the year came from a small cluster of operators in the Erongo desert. Swakop Uranium runs the Husab mine, one of the world’s larger open-pit uranium operations; the long-established Rossing mine continues under its Chinese ownership; and Paladin Energy, majority owner of Langer Heinrich, spent the year ramping a mine it had brought back from years of standstill. These are the operators whose production choices delivered the 20.8 percent output rise.
What unites them is that each is a large, capital-heavy operation run to a long horizon. The decision to restart Langer Heinrich, taken when prices recovered, is the kind of operator judgement that shows up in a national figure only a year or two later. The 2025 numbers are, in part, the payoff of restart calls made earlier.
A national output rise is really a few operators’ restart and ramp-up decisions, added together.
The gold operators alongside them
Gold’s contribution came from its own set of operators. B2Gold runs the Otjikoto mine, which concluded open-pit mining during 2025 while continuing underground and advancing the work that will feed the plant into the next decade. QKR’s Navachab mine near Karibib keeps investing to extend its life beyond 2030, and Osino Resources is building the Twin Hills mine toward first gold in 2027.
These are operators managing the awkward middle of a mine’s life – one closing a pit while opening the ground beneath it, another stretching an ageing asset, a third still in construction. The modest 1.9 percent gold rise sits on top of very different operator situations, which is why a single sector figure flattens a set of quite distinct stories.
One gold number hides an operator closing a pit, another extending a mine, a third still building one.
The people who convene the sector
Between the mines and the public sits the Chamber leadership, and its role is convening rather than operating. Malango, a mining engineer with more than three decades in the industry across the region, has spent his tenure translating what operators do into a case the state and the public can weigh. Botshiwe, as president, fronts the industry’s collective positions on the year’s results and its outlook.
That convening job is easy to underrate. A sector of a few large, often foreign-owned operators needs a domestic institution that can speak for the whole and hold members to a common standard on employment, procurement and disclosure. The Chamber’s figures are only as good as the operators’ willingness to report honestly to it, which makes the relationship a quiet part of the year’s credibility.
The Chamber cannot mine a tonne, but without it the operators would have no single, accountable voice.
What the operators need to repeat it
For the operators to repeat 2025, the unglamorous conditions have to hold: reliable water and power in the Erongo, a workforce that is now 97 percent Namibian across Chamber members, and the patient capital that restarts and expansions require. A record year proves the operators can deliver when prices and inputs align; it does not guarantee the alignment will last.
The measure of these operators is continuity through the cycle. The restart that lifted uranium was a bet placed in a better market; the real test is which operators keep producing, hiring and building when prices soften. A year on, the question will not be who announced the record but who is still running the mines that made it.
The operators are judged not on the year prices handed them but on the ones they have to work through.
For an investor, a partner or a policymaker, Namibia’s 2025 result is best read through its operators: a few uranium and gold houses in and around the Erongo, and a chamber that speaks for them. The decision it puts forward is whether to back the operators and the conditions that let them produce – water, power, skilled people and patient capital – rather than the commodity prices that will get the credit but that no operator controls.
Sources: The Namibian; Uranium in Namibia (World Nuclear Association); Management (Chamber of Mines of Namibia)
