Visa support
We recommend two agencies that we consider to be honest and corruption-free. (Since corruption always takes 2, you shouldn't be the one).
The Visa Shop
Alicia Booysen
P.O.Box 98231 Pelican Square
Windhoek
Tel.: 00264 (0) 61 220926
Mobile: 00264 (0) 81 435 0501
www.ebooysen-consultingcc.com
Marietha Bouwer Agencies
Emce Bouwer-Dodds
P.O.Box 22259 Planck Street,
Southern Industrial Area Windhoek
Tel.: 00264 (0) 61 255 710
Mobile: 00264 (0) 81 273 5146
Why an agency?
An agency makes sense because they check for completeness, know a few current magic words for the motivation letter and, above all, regularly call afterwards to find out who the person responsible is and when the next selection conference is scheduled.
Even before Covid times, only around 6-9 of the required 26 meetings of the decision-making committee met, of which only two were able to make decisions. So there are rather uncontrollable organizational problems on the part of the ministries.
These forms must be completed.
Here is a collection of originals as of January 2024
Collection of forms.pdf
Residence permit
Anyone wishing to stay in the country for longer than 90 days is subject to special “immigration” legislation.
The basic legislation for this was set out in the Immigration Control Act of 1993.
Namibia is currently in the process of making it easier for foreigners to obtain (permanent) residence permits
https://www.namibian.com.na/192507/archive-read/Govt-to-attract-rich-foreign-pensioners
and to create our own investor law.
Permanent residence permit
So far, if you are older than 55 and invest 75,000 euros into home ownership in Namibia and have the same amount available in an account in Namibia, you will receive a permanent residence permit.
From the age of 65 onwards, the domicile was only available relatively quickly if you could prove that you had a sufficient pension or were married to a Namibian.
As a younger investor, you need to raise around N$5 million, but it is calculated over 10 years and 10 years of pension benefits are taken into account.
Until now, you can usually only apply for permanent residency after several work permits after 10 years.
You can apply for this permission in advance with a preliminary contract for the purchase of an apartment or house. Sometimes it is approved, sometimes not. A system cannot be recognized from the outside.
In principle, there are currently no binding numbers that must be met; each application is a case-by-case decision.
Permanent residence certificate, registered in the master roll
I am listed at Windhoek Aliens Control.
It's in the safe.
Permanent residence stamp in passport.
However, since you are registered electronically and are recognized with your passport at all border stations, it will only be stamped for a fee when your passport number is renewed.
The stamp used to have to be renewed every 2-3 years for a fee, now only with a new passport. Then you are back in the system.
Work permit
Anyone who can or wants to create jobs is welcome anyway. However, he is not allowed to have his registered office in our Cloud 9 residential complex as it is a residential district. However, as a Cloud 9 resident, you can rent our office space on an hourly basis to send your company emails.
The advantage is that a PR owner is on an equal footing with a Namibian in almost all company areas.
All he needs is a local Namibian tax advisor.
There is sometimes the strange situation that a 100% German as a 100% shareholder in a company in Namibia is considered a 100% Namibian company. This is the case, for example, with the well-known safari company Bwana Tucke-Tucke.
If you would like to voluntarily contribute qualifications to the town of Omaruru without payment, you can also email me. It makes it easier for us to create a list of “social commitments”. This makes it more palatable to the city administration and the residents of Omaruru that many foreigners are moving to Omaruru as part of the project.
Examples: The astronomers among the interested parties can offer a monthly starry night for school classes, the doctors can offer further training for their colleagues in the private or state hospital, engineers can occasionally provide advice, kindergarten support concepts.
Interns or students in the voluntary social year in social institutions do not need work permits for up to 90 days in the calendar year (except for veterinarians).
Namibia Investment Promotion and Development Board
Investors generally receive support via the Investment Center NIPDB.
However, they are almost exclusively concerned with oil, gas, hydrogen and raw material investments.
You get a quick overview of the relevant legislation.
Company formation, labor legislation and taxes can be found in this investor guide for Namibia.
In the Investment House on the corner of Garden Street / Dr. A.B. May Street in Windhoek you can get advice and all relevant forms.
Normal work permits also work. It's best to show proof of payment for the permit from the Namibian embassy in Germany, which speeds things up enormously.
However, permanent residence with a work permit is only granted upon application after the work permit has been re-issued several times after 6-10 years, also depending on whether you also have investor status. Otherwise, 10 years is the rule.
Tax registrations and employees subject to social security contributions are primarily monitored in the form of “assistant service supervision”.
Digital Nomad Visa
A fresh special form of visa is the DIGITAL NOMAD VISA, which was introduced in October 2022 and is valid for up to 6 months.
It is particularly suitable for people who want to spend the European / US American winter in Namibia and extended home offices. Namibia hopes to bring purchasing power into the country and also an additional tourist boost.
Here are the regulations
In practice, the visa has not been a success so far because you have to provide extensive documentation like for a normal work permit and the investment center has no time or desire to process these applications. They recommend that you enter the country with a 90-day tourism visa and then extend it locally at the Ministry of the Interior. They simply pass the problem to another department.
Result after one year: According to figures from the Investment and Development Board (NIPDB), a total of 38 visa applications were received. Of these, 19 were approved.
There are currently 46 employees in the Ministry of the Interior of Namibia who are directly involved in issuing work or residence permits. Of course there are such and such (rascals) there.
As Cloud 9, we have the opportunity to go to the Ministry of the Interior with a list of our residents that we have checked in advance and choose a person to process the individual, complete applications.
Why is it so complicated to get a permanent residence permit in Namibia?
It's not so much complicated as it is unpredictable.
Tip: Submit all the required documents and then see what happens and then decide how to react. Foreigners can also take legal action against administrative decisions in Namibia.
Since almost all sorts of rumors are being spread about the independent state of Namibia issuing a visa, hardly anyone is trying. The rumor spreaders usually say that the Namibian state does not want to allow "whites" into the country if their application is not processed or even rejected.
From our perspective over the years, there is no such “agenda.” Most of the problems seem to lie with the applicant and the organizational incompetence of the Namibian ministries.
Well, on the one hand, many applicants do not submit all of their documents. For example, many Europeans cannot understand why a TB-free lung X-ray has to be included with the application. So you leave it alone. The person working in the Ministry of the Interior ticks off his checklist of the required documents. If something is missing, the application goes to the bottom of the pile. Of course he doesn't call and inform anyone that something is still missing. Actually, Namibia is not waiting for you.
There are no functioning staff regulations in the ministries. For example, if a processor dies, the applications on his desk would have to be passed on to another appointed processor until the position is re-advertised and filled. First the advertisements are advertised internally in the ministry, then externally, then promising applicants have to be invited to interviews and then you have to decide on the hopefully best one.
However, the best ones usually have a job with a 3-month notice period; in practice, they only start the job approximately 1-1 1/2 years after the person working in the job has died.
In the meantime, the letters A-D have not been processed during the entire time and the new clerk finds a desk full of work.
According to the Interior Ministry's self-disclosure, the system of assigned clerks to the applicants' initials has now been replaced by a temporal receipt processing system. Sometimes the decision is made very quickly (3-4 months), sometimes it takes a long time. So you shouldn't sit on packed suitcases.
The second bottleneck is the meeting of the Immigration Selection Board. The organizational inability to coordinate appointments or send substitute players with voting rights means that the committee often does not have a quorum, meaning that many applications have to be decided very quickly in just a few meetings per year. Where the application has been well prepared by the Namibian Investment Center, you are quickly waved through; those who have to go through the Ministry of the Interior with a different quality of civil servant are sometimes unlucky or not lucky at all.
