Flags. Folders. A handshake. A Cabinet brief the next morning. Then the claim that economic diplomacy is working.
An MOU is not a deal. The paper usually says the parties intend to cooperate. It does not, by itself, move a container, hire a worker, or put a Namibian dollar in the fiscus. If we are serious about economic diplomacy, we should stop counting ceremonies and start counting results.
Under the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, a treaty is a written international agreement between states governed by international law.
The name on the cover does not decide the legal character. Intention does.
Namibia’s Constitution already knows the difference that matters at home. The President negotiates and signs under Article 32(3)(e). Cabinet assists under Article 40(i).
The National Assembly must agree to ratification or accession under Article 63(2)(e). Binding agreements then form part of Namibian law under Article 144.
An MOU is typically used to step around that machine. Cabinet can approve it, a minister can sign it in public, and it never reaches Parliament.
Non-binding instruments sit outside the public treaty record a citizen can actually read.
The instrument is cheap: cheap in law, cheap in scrutiny, cheap in follow-through.
Cabinet now regularly “approves the signing” of memoranda — with Spain on fisheries, with Malta on research, with China’s Ministry of Public Security on police cooperation — as if a policy has been delivered.
A signature is not an economic result, and it is not a plan with a named owner, a budget and a date.
The Presidency supplies the photograph. Cabinet supplies the decision. The ministry supplies the talking point. Nobody supplies the ledger.
States should talk. The harder point is this: a memo that binds nobody is processed through the highest executive body in the Republic so that it can be reported as delivery.
Namibia still has no public register.
I will not invent a round number. I can count what the Presidency, Cabinet and our partners have themselves announced since President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah took office in March 2025.
On 9 July 2025, during Prime Minister Modi’s state visit, India’s official outcomes list recorded two government-to-government MOUs: health and medicine, and an entrepreneurship development centre. Some coverage flattened related announcements into “four MOUs”. The official Indian list did not.
On 10 October 2025, the Botswana–Namibia Bi-National Commission in Windhoek produced eight new instruments, reported as memoranda covering energy, culture, science, corrections, police, health, labour, and the employment of diplomatic spouses.
The President said it could never be business as usual, and that ministers must keep to timelines.
On 17 July 2026, in Pretoria, the two Presidents welcomed seven new instruments.
Five were MOUs. One was a Bilateral Air Services Agreement, a real treaty-form instrument. One was a chamber-to-chamber pact. Most of that package binds nobody to anything. High ceremony. Low paper. Almost no public text.
The strongest evidence that these instruments stall is the 17 July 2026 Pretoria communiqué. Paragraph 7 records the need to accelerate outstanding decisions and agreements.
The two leaders agreed that future cooperation should focus on “measurable programmes and projects capable of generating tangible economic and developmental benefits.” Paragraph 16 directed ministries to develop “clear implementation plans… with defined responsibilities and timeframes.”
“The true measure of our success will not be the number of agreements we sign, but the effectiveness with which we implement them.”
That is President Ramaphosa, reported after the same session.
Pretoria put the implementation gap in writing.
Windhoek signed the same page. If last year’s instruments had been working, this year’s communiqué would not have had to order implementation plans for the new ones.
On 10 February 2026 President Nandi-Ndaitwah told the diplomatic corps that economic diplomacy was now “a central instrument in advancing our national development objectives.”
She set her own test. International partnerships must translate into “tangible and measurable benefits,” including increased investment, expanded trade, skills development, technology transfer and sustainable employment. Hold the government to that test.
The Bank of Namibia’s August 2026 outlook estimated growth of 1.7 percent in 2025 and revised 2026 growth down to 2.1 percent.
The IMF’s 2026 Article IV still records unemployment at 36.9 percent, and 44.4 percent among youth, and says growth remains insufficient to reduce unemployment, inequality and poverty in a meaningful way.
Memoranda did not cause those numbers.
If economic diplomacy were doing what the Presidency says it is for, we would be able to show the bridge from each signature to a measurable result.
The public record does not show that bridge. The ceremonies keep multiplying. The growth figure was revised down.
Five things would count. First, publish the text. If Cabinet can approve an MOU, the public can read it. Second, say whether it is intended to bind; if it is, it belongs on the ratification path.
Third, name the owner, the budget and the date — Paragraph 16 of the Pretoria communiqué already asked for this.
Fourth, table an annual return in the National Assembly against the President’s own list: investment, trade, skills, technology, jobs. Fifth, stop using Cabinet as a printing press for headlines.
A small state cannot out-photograph larger partners. It can out-prepare them.
The question after every signing should be the same: who must do what, by when, with which money, and what will a Namibian be able to see?
Until that question has an answer, an MOU remains stationery.
