On 2 April 2025, the Namibian Presidency confirmed that President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah had committed to relaunching the country's national airline through a public-private partnership, with operations expected to resume between June and December 2026.1 The new carrier, named Namibia Air, would begin with regional Southern Africa routes before expanding to Frankfurt and Cape Town. N$3 billion in investment is required over five years. N$20 million has been allocated for a feasibility study.
Namibia Air is being built. What is not being built, at the same pace or with the same political urgency, is the SADC Single Aviation Market that would give Namibia Air the regional framework without which it cannot achieve scale, sustainability or strategic purpose.
A new airline without a new architecture
Air Namibia was liquidated in February 2021, a decision taken under the Geingob Cabinet on the grounds that the airline had become an unsustainable financial burden. The airline had consumed more than N$11 billion in government bailouts over its operational life.2 Its assets at book value stood at N$981 million as at August 2020 against liabilities of N$3 billion. The total fiscal cost of Air Namibia's failure exceeded US$453 million at 2021 values.
President Nandi-Ndaitwah, who took office in March 2025, has reversed that assessment. She regards the airline as a national asset and a matter of sovereign pride, and has committed to relaunching it under a public-private partnership model that avoids the governance failures of its predecessor. The government has been explicit that it is not reviving Air Namibia. It is building something new, with a different ownership model, a phased route strategy and a feasibility framework that the previous iteration never had.
SAATM has the signatures. It does not have the political will.
The Single African Air Transport Market was launched as a flagship African Union programme in 2018, built on the Yamoussoukro Decision and designed to create a unified continental air transport market. As of 2026, 38 African states have signed SAATM and 26 have taken the further step of signing Memoranda of Implementation, collectively accounting for approximately 80 percent of Africa's air traffic.3 The framework has produced measurable outputs: more than 110 new intra-African routes developed, 60 bilateral air services agreements modified, and the development of regulatory texts covering competition, consumer protection and dispute resolution.
Africa remains structurally more open to external aviation partners than to fellow African states. The energy applied to negotiating with non-African partners is rarely applied to concluding agreements with neighbouring African states.
The gap between commitment and implementation is structural. A panel discussion at the African Airlines Association Annual General Assembly in December 2025 noted that travelling between African cities often takes longer and costs more than travelling to the Middle East or Europe. A journey from Tunisia to Southern Africa can take more than 13 hours. Many governments maintain older bilateral or regional agreements with clauses that directly contradict SAATM goals, allowing them to apply limits on flight frequencies, reject traffic rights or impose high taxes that make operations more expensive, while formally remaining signatories to the liberalisation framework.
What Namibia's tourism corridor depends on
Namibia's tourism sector is performing strongly by its own historical standards. Hotel occupancy reached 67.55 percent in August 2025, the highest monthly rate ever recorded.4 Tourism contributes N$7.2 billion to Namibia's GDP and supports tens of thousands of direct and indirect jobs. Namibia recorded 863,872 international tourist arrivals in 2023, nearly doubling from 461,027 in 2022.
Germany, Austria and Switzerland — the DACH market — contributed 40.29 percent of total Namibia arrivals in April 2025. These visitors fly European carriers. Namibia Air cannot compete on Frankfurt routes without the scale that a functioning SADC open skies framework would generate from regional traffic aggregation.
Three interventions that cannot be deferred
The first intervention requires SADC member states to convert their SAATM commitments into enforceable bilateral agreements with specific route liberalisation targets, frequency minimums and timeline commitments. The current framework allows governments to sign Memoranda of Implementation while maintaining older bilateral agreements that contradict liberalisation principles. This ambiguity is not accidental. It serves the short-term revenue interests of governments that treat aviation as a tax source rather than economic infrastructure.
The second intervention requires Namibia Air to be structured from its launch date as a regional network carrier rather than a standalone flag carrier. This means negotiating interline and codeshare agreements with South African Airways, Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airlines and RwandAir before the first flight departs, not after the route network has been established. The history of African flag carrier failures is substantially a history of carriers that attempted to build network value before securing network partners.
The third intervention requires the SADC Secretariat to establish a minimum viable connectivity standard as a condition of SAATM membership, defining a minimum number of intra-SADC city pairs that must be served at competitive fares within a defined timeline. Africa's aviation liberalisation agenda has stalled precisely because there are no consequences for non-implementation. Governments benefit from the diplomatic credibility of SAATM membership without bearing the commercial cost of genuine market opening. Namibia Air's relaunch provides exactly the moment of political salience that SADC needs to move from a framework to a functioning market. Whether Southern Africa's governments choose to use that moment is the question this publication will continue to track.