HAGE GEINGOB is in a bind. After years of perkiness, Namibia’s economic growth rate shrank from more than 5% in 2015 to a dismal 0.1% last year—and may now have stalled completely. But though President Geingob is an avowed friend of the market and seeks foreign investors, populists within his ruling South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) are calling for measures that would hobble the economy still more, by implementing a draft bill known as the National Equitable Economic Empowerment Framework (NEEEF). It would knee the business class in the groin, especially the white part of it, which still drives the economy.

Under NEEEF, all businesses, however small, would have to be at least 25%-owned by “previously disadvantaged persons”, broadly meaning black Namibians. No company would be allowed to “allot, issue, or register the transfer of any portion of its ownership…to a person that is not previously disadvantaged or to a domestic or foreign enterprise owned by a person that is not previously disadvantaged”. At least half of all company boards and management would have to be black, too.

If NEEEF were enacted, it would probably be abused by ruling-party bigwigs to grab stakes in other people’s businesses in the name of uplifting the previously disadvantaged, as has happened in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Many white-owned businesses would close, and foreign investors would shy away. So Mr Geingob, hitherto more pragmatic and business-minded than his two presidential predecessors, seems loth to go ahead with the bill, first put forward in 2015. But a souring political mood has revived talk of NEEEF. He has also spoken recently of expropriating white-owned land, albeit with fair compensation, another recipe for clobbering productivity. His prime minister, egged on by the country’s first president, Sam Nujoma, who still hankers after the socialism espoused during SWAPO’s long years in exile, is said to be a NEEEFer.

Calls for black empowerment resonate because, although Namibia is deemed a middle-income country with bountiful reserves of minerals (in particular diamonds and uranium), a tiny population (2.3m) and a prosperous if small black middle class, it is also one of the world’s most unequal. Poverty is rife. Some 40% of the population still live in shacks. The unemployment rate, some reckon, is at least 40%.

Mr Geingob was elected in 2014 with a whopping 87% of the vote. Yet he is sounding unusually twitchy in the run-up to a party congress later in the year, at which he is likely to be re-elected as party leader, but may find a new vice-president breathing down his neck.