Christiaan Keulder – October 2026 – Namibia
On the eve of its resource boom, Namibia presents a public that is open in principle and closed at the paycheque. Namibians welcome continental trade and regional mobility in the abstract, and they accept immigrants as neighbours, yet three-quarters would admit fewer or no foreign job seekers.
That economic restrictionism is empirically distinct from social tolerance; it is regionally high; and, most strikingly, it is a broad national consensus rather than the grievance of any threatened group. Namibia is not South Africa. It restricts labour without the ethnocultural hostility that has fuelled organised xenophobia next door. But its consensus is a substrate that a jobless boom, or an enterprising politics, could activate.