Namibia’s communications regulator said on Monday it dismissed an appeal by Starlink against the rejection of its licence applications, reaffirming that Elon Musk’s satellite internet provider failed to meet local ownership requirements.
The Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia (Cran) rejected Starlink’s applications for a telecommunications service licence and radio spectrum access licence in March, citing non-compliance with ownership and control requirements under the country’s Communications Act.
“Starlink’s application remained non-compliant with the ownership and control requirements under section 46 of the Communications Act,” said Cran a statement.
The regulator added that Starlink’s reconsideration application was filed after the statutory deadline, which expired on 23 April.
Cran received 624 reconsideration requests from the public, 622 of which were dismissed for failing to meet procedural and jurisdictional requirements.
The two submissions that met the threshold introduced no new facts and identified no material error in the original decision, the regulator said.
“Cran affirms that the reconsideration of requests did not provide a sufficient legal or factual basis to alter the original decision,” it added.
‘Not black’
In neighbouring South Africa, Starlink’s path to market has stalled on almost identical grounds. South African law requires telecoms licence holders to be at least 30% owned by historically disadvantaged groups, a threshold SpaceX has repeatedly said it can’t meet, arguing it will not cede equity in any local subsidiary. Musk, who was born in Pretoria, has gone further, claiming he cannot obtain a licence in his home country “because I’m not black”.
Communications minister Solly Malatsi, a senior DA figure in the government of national unity, has tried to engineer a way through. In December he gazetted a final policy direction instructing regulator Icasa to recognise equity equivalent investment programmes, or EEIPs, which let multinationals invest in skills, enterprise development or infrastructure instead of selling shares.
Malatsi insists the reform is not designed for any single company, but it was widely read as clearing a path for Starlink and ignited a political firestorm inside the coalition, with the ANC, EFF and MK Party all opposing it and the latter two threatening court action.
That route has since hit a wall of its own. In May, Icasa told the minister it could not give full effect to the direction without an amendment to the Electronic Communications Act, pushing any resolution into a parliamentary process that could run for months or years. Malatsi has said the government will now pursue those legislative changes.
The practical position remains unchanged. Icasa says it has received no formal licence application from SpaceX, the service is used locally only through grey-market imports, and a legal launch is now widely seen as unlikely before 2027. On both sides of the border, the ownership rules remain the obstacle and the politics show no sign of cooling. — (c) 2026 Reuters, with additional reporting (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media