After a two-year delay the government will now finally embark on a compre-hensive black economic empowerment (BEE) policy reaching all sectors of the economy, Prime Minister Nahas Angula announced Thursday. Briefing media on the latest Cabinet decisions, The Prime Minister said the responsible technical Cabinet committee would be revived. That committee had some time ago drafted a policy, but it had borrowed heavily from South Africa and did not reflect the Namibian context properly. "This document will now be updated and the new policy framework to be developed from it will be called Transformational Economic and Social Empowerment Framework (TESEF)", Angula told reporters.

"The TESEF will aim at the ex-ploitation of untapped economic potentials in Namibia like value adding production, manufacturing, import substitution and productivity of the subsistence economies in rural communities", Angula explained.

However, similar to South Africa, BEE would mean changing ownership patterns in companies, the Premier added, "acquiring productive assets indigenous Namibians through the programme of indigenisation". Angula did not define what an "indigenous" Namibian is, since most people living in Namibia migrated to the country 100-300 years ago and only the San or Bushman people are the truly indigenous inhabitants of Namibia, having lived here for several ten thousand years.

The Cabinet committee will now draft the terms of reference (TORs) for the new policy, identify a technical agency to guide the policy development process. Mobilise. Resources need to be mobilised to appoint experts as consultations must be held with different stakeholders.

BEE will mean similar to South Africa that companies in sectors inter alia like mining, fishing, finance and tourism have to enable black Namibians to obtain ownership in their companies over a certain time frame and appoint more black managers.