By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 09
A record fiscal figure has authors. Behind the N$7.8 billion sit the operators and officials who must sustain it.
A tax figure is announced by someone and produced by someone else. The N$7.8 billion for 2025 was presented by an industry president who also runs one of the mines that generated it, to a new minister only months into the portfolio, at the sector’s annual gathering.
That cast matters because the number is not self-sustaining. The review that reported N$7.8 billion in taxes was delivered at the Chamber of Mines annual general meeting on 21 May 2026 by president George Botshiwe, with Modestus Amutse, Minister of Industries, Mines and Energy, in the room. The operators behind the figure are named, and so is the policy hand now on the sector.
The president who also runs a mine
George Botshiwe presented the record from an unusual vantage point. As managing director of the Navachab gold mine, he leads one of the two gold operations the Chamber credited with driving the corporate-tax surge, and as Chamber president he was retained in the role for the 2026 to 2027 term at the same annual meeting.
That dual position gives the numbers a particular weight. The person announcing a gold-led tax record also carries operational responsibility for delivering it, which tends to make the industry’s public case more measured than a pure lobbying voice would be.
The man presenting the record also has to keep producing it.
A minister still finding the brief
On the government side, the portfolio is newly held. Modestus Amutse was appointed Minister of Industries, Mines and Energy on 2 December 2025, arriving from a communications background only months before the sector handed him a headline fiscal result to interpret.
A record tax year is a favourable inheritance and a demanding one. The minister must decide how to read a 39 per cent jump that owes more to the gold price than to policy, and whether to bank the goodwill or press the harder reforms the falling investment ranking implies.
His early positioning will set the tone for how operators and investors read the state. A minister who treats a price-driven windfall as vindication invites complacency; one who names the concentration and investment risks behind it signals a government reading the same fragilities the Chamber flagged. The operators presenting the record are, in effect, waiting to see which reading the new office adopts.
A record landed early is a gift that still has to be understood.
The operators inside the figure
Beneath the officials sit the mines themselves. The Chamber named B2Gold’s Otjikoto operation and the Navachab gold mine as the principal engines of the corporate-tax rise, while uranium operators lifted production more than a fifth. These are the operating companies whose output, not any announcement, produced the N$7.8 billion.
Their record is the evidence behind the rhetoric. A fiscal claim rests on operators who actually ran their plants through a strong price year, which is why the profile of the number is finally a profile of the companies that mined it.
The figure has authors, and they are the operators who ran the plants.
What the operators need to hold it
For the result to repeat, the same operators need conditions they do not fully control: a firm gold and uranium price, a workable investment climate, and a minister who converts a good year into durable policy. Leadership here is shared between a president who mines, a minister who is new, and companies carrying the daily load.
The measure of all of them is continuity. A year from now the question will not be who announced N$7.8 billion, but which operators and which policy decisions kept the sector able to earn it again.
Next year’s test is not who announced the record but who sustained it.
For an investor, a partner or an official reading the sector, the Namibian mining figure is inseparable from the people behind it: an operator-president, a new minister and the gold and uranium companies that produced the tax. The decision each of them now faces is whether to treat N$7.8 billion as a settled achievement or as a result that only holds if operators, prices and policy keep working together.
Sources: The Namibian; Botshiwe, Roos and Simataa retained in Chamber leadership (Mining & Energy); President appoints Modestus Amutse as new Minister of Mines (Namibia Economist)
