By Mbangula Lameck Amugongo
In 2010, I received a call from the then Telecom Namibia bursary officer informing me that I was one of the successful candidates to be awarded a fully funded bursary from Telecom Namibia.
It was this funding that enabled me to pursue and complete my Bachelor’s IT in Software Engineering at the then Polytechnic of Namibia, a life-defining moment that changed my life.
After graduating, I joined Telecom Namibia and spent six rewarding years working across different departments. One of my key roles was as a Business Intelligence Analyst, where I provided data-driven insights to support strategic decision-making.
During my time at Telecom Namibia, I also furthered my education, obtaining a Master’s degree in Computer Science.
The exposure I gained through business intelligence and data analytics sparked a deeper interest in artificial intelligence (AI), a field that would later shape my academic and professional journey.
That foundation inspired me to leave Namibia and pursue a PhD in the United Kingdom. Looking back, much of my interest in AI can be traced to my work at Telecom Namibia, where I first witnessed the power of data and how it can be leveraged to solve complex problems and drive meaningful outcomes.
Today, my career focuses on applying AI to solve real-world challenges, particularly in healthcare, and I have the privilege of contributing to research, governance, and responsible AI development internationally.
Because of that, Telecom Namibia is personal to me. Telecom Namibia did not simply provide jobs; it built skills, shaped careers, and created opportunities that extended far beyond its walls.
It invested in people, and those investments continue to pay dividends for Namibia and the world. That is precisely why Telecom Namibia must not be allowed to go the route of Air Namibia and become another failed state-owned enterprise.
This article is therefore a personal, and perhaps blunt, appeal to the new board and the shareholder. I offer it with respect, but also with urgency. Telecom Namibia’s challenges are real. But they can still be fixed.
In 2022, I was invited by Telecom Namibia management to present at a management retreat in Windhoek, a presentation under the title: Telecom Namibia in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Embracing Digital Transformation.
My message then was simple: the telecom industry was changing rapidly. Artificial intelligence, over-the-top services, digital media platforms and data-driven business models were no longer future concepts; they were already reshaping the sector.
I argued that traditional telcos could no longer survive on voice, broadband and infrastructure alone. Around the world, telecom companies were becoming “Melcos”, hybrid media and telecommunications businesses that use data, platforms and partnerships to create new revenue streams.
Companies such as Verizon, Orange and others had already moved into media, fintech and digital services. Even MTC is moving in this direction with MTC Maris.
The warning was clear: telcos that failed to transform would be reduced to expensive infrastructure providers while technology companies captured the real value.
Four years later, AI has become mainstream. We are now speaking not only about digital transformation, but about agentic AI, which are autonomous AI systems that pursue goals, make decisions and execute their own actions with minimal intervention.
In telecommunications, this means networks that can detect faults before customers complain, customer-service systems that understand context, and products that are personalised in real time. This is the age in which Telecom Namibia must compete.
Yet customers continue to experience service failures. Recent reports show that Telecom Namibia faced major disruptions linked to international connectivity failures, slower internet speeds, intermittent mobile data access and instability across fixed and mobile services.
In April 2026, the company acknowledged that failures on two high-capacity international links to South Africa caused nationwide disruption, exposing vulnerabilities where legacy infrastructure meets modern systems.
To be fair, Telecom Namibia has acknowledged these challenges and announced network modernisation efforts under its 2027 Integrated Strategic Business Plan.
These include stabilising the business, business transformation, digitalisation, and digital transformation. These are important steps. But the real question is whether these goals will be achieved before the end of 2027?
What must be done?
The first urgent priority should be a comprehensive, modern billing and customer-management system for both fixed and mobile services. Billing has been a thorn in Telecom Namibia’s side since at least 2012/2013.
A telecom company cannot compete in the AI era if it cannot bill accurately, provision services quickly, understand customer behaviour, or offer seamless digital products.
Even something as basic as eSIM provisioning should not be a struggle in 2026. MTC launched eSIM services in Namibia in 2025, showing that the market is ready for this level of convenience.
Second, Telecom Namibia must rethink its access network strategy. Pulling fibre or copper into every home is expensive, slow and vulnerable to theft.
Competitors are already offering high-speed wireless solutions that avoid the need for traditional last-mile cabling. Telecom Namibia needs similar scalable products: fixed wireless access, 5G-ready home broadband, and flexible business connectivity that can be installed quickly and maintained efficiently.
Third, network modernisation must move beyond replacing equipment. Telecom Namibia should incrementally build an agentic network, starting in Windhoek and expanding outward.
Such a network would use AI to predict congestion, detect faults, reroute traffic, monitor power systems, reduce downtime and support pre-emptive customer care. The April 2026 outage showed that manual recovery and fragmented systems are no longer acceptable.
Customers do not care whether the failure is local, international or vendor-related. They simply want reliable connectivity.
Fourth, customer service must be rebuilt around the customer, not around internal departments. A modern telco company must make it easy to buy, activate, upgrade, troubleshoot and cancel services. Customers should not have to understand Telecom Namibia’s internal complexity.
Digital self-service, proactive outage alerts, transparent restoration timelines and empowered frontline agents should be the standard.
Fifth, Telecom Namibia must make difficult decisions about structure. This is unpopular, but necessary. The company is not sustainable in its current form.
If MTC, with higher revenue, can operate with about 500 permanent employees while Telecom Namibia has about 1,000, then the shareholder and board must honestly ask whether the current structure supports competitiveness. This is not a call for people to lose their jobs recklessly.
It is a call for responsible restructuring, reskilling and redeployment into areas that create future value: AI operations, cybersecurity, cloud services, enterprise solutions, data analytics and digital product development.
Finally, Telecom Namibia needs deep technical leadership. Digital transformation cannot be led by good English alone. It requires people who are “techies” through and through; leaders who can challenge vendors, understand architecture, interrogate technical proposals, and know when a solution is not fit for purpose. This will ensure that vendors do not lead the strategy, but that Telecom Namibia does.
I sincerely hope the board, together with the shareholder, will appoint a competent “Techie” as the next CEO of Telecom Namibia.
Telecom Namibia still has strengths: extensive national infrastructure, strong brand recognition, long-standing enterprise relationships, government backing, and perhaps most importantly, the loyalty of many Namibians whose lives and careers were shaped by the institution.
These advantages provide a foundation that many companies would envy.
But nostalgia will not save Telecom Namibia. Only courage, technical excellence, commercial discipline and customer obsession will. What Telecom Namibia needs now is not another beautifully written strategy document destined for a shelf. It needs decisive execution.
It needs speed in responding to market realities. It needs accountability at every level of the organisation. And above all, it needs leaders brave enough to admit that the old telecom model is dead.
In conclusion, the future of telecommunications belongs to telcos that become digital platforms. Telecom Namibia can still be one of them, but only if it stops managing decline and starts building the future.
*Mbangula Lameck Amugongo is a technology activist, AI/ML specialist and AI ethics advisor based in Europe. He holds a B.IT: Software Engineering, a Master’s in Computer Science, and a PhD from the University of Manchester. The views expressed are his own.
