By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 08

Behind the N$7.8 billion tax figure sit two land questions: whose water the mines use, and where their money lands.

The tax figure measures what mining gives the treasury. The sustainability figures measure what it takes from and returns to the land, and in a country as dry as Namibia those are the numbers that decide whether a mining boom is compatible with farming and food security at all.

Two lines in the review carry that weight. The same industry that paid N$7.8 billion in tax also spent N$23.97 billion (about US$1.3 billion) on locally sourced goods and services, some 65 per cent of its total procurement, while its expanding uranium operations lean on a coast where fresh water is the binding constraint shared with everyone else on the land.

Water is the shared limit

Namibia’s central coast runs on two groundwater aquifers and the Orano-owned Erongo desalination plant, and that combined supply has reached its sustainable limit against demand from mining, industry, towns and agriculture together. Every additional uranium tonne draws on the same constrained system that farms and settlements depend on.

That shared ceiling is the sustainability crux. Mining’s expansion is not free of the land; it competes for the one input that arid agriculture cannot substitute, which is why how the sector sources its water matters as much as how much tax it pays.

On this coast, water is the input mining and farming cannot both take for granted.

Desalination as the relief valve

The pressure has a partial answer. The Erongo desalination plant produced a record 17.59 million cubic metres of potable water in 2025, a 14 per cent rise on the year, against an operating capacity of 22.5 million and a design capacity of 45 million cubic metres. A second plant is under construction to add further supply.

For food systems, desalinated seawater is the sustainability hinge. Water the mines draw from the sea is water they do not draw from aquifers that farming and rural communities rely on, which is how a growing extractive sector and a fragile agricultural base can, in principle, share the same region.

Seawater the mines desalinate is groundwater the farms get to keep.

Where the local money lands

The N$23.97 billion in local procurement is the other side of mining’s footprint on the land. At 65 per cent of total buying, that spend flows into domestic suppliers, small and medium enterprises and service firms, some of them feeding, transporting and supplying communities well beyond the mine gate.

The Chamber frames this local spend as support for small and medium enterprises, local supply chains and domestic value creation. For a rural economy, procurement that stays in the country keeps more of a commodity year circulating on the land it came from rather than leaking to distant suppliers.

The durability of that arrangement is political as much as commercial. When mining spend reaches local farms, hauliers and food suppliers, communities gain a direct stake in the sector continuing, and in it managing water responsibly. A model that spreads its spend and shares its water tends to be defended; one that concentrates both invites the resistance that stalls projects.

Local procurement keeps a commodity year circulating on the land, not offshore.

The stewardship balance

The sustainability question is whether the sector can keep growing without exhausting the water and goodwill it shares with agriculture. Desalination and high local procurement pull in the right direction; unchecked demand on a maxed-out supply pulls the other way. Balance, not maximum extraction, is the durable target.

The risk is that a strong tax year encourages expansion faster than water infrastructure can follow. Revenue that outruns the region’s carrying capacity trades a few good years against the land’s longer-term ability to support both mining and farming.

The land carries mining and farming together only if neither outruns the water.

For anyone in agribusiness, conservation finance or rural water policy, the mining review is a land-use signal as much as a fiscal one: N$7.8 billion in tax rests on a water system that farming also depends on. The decision for planners is whether to tie mining’s expansion to the desalination and local-supply investment that lets a dry country carry both, rather than letting a good commodity year quietly overdraw the land.

Sources: The Namibian; Orano’s Erongo plant produces record 17.6m cubic metres (The Brief); Mining sector spends N$23.97bn locally (Mining & Energy)