In March 2026, Namibia’s only recognised music royalty collector told the public that a widely quoted N$2-per-play royalty rate was not, in fact, a rate at all. Four months later, the same society’s board chairperson gave the public a number nobody had put to it before: administrative costs were eating 62 percent of what it collects. Put the two statements next to each other and a question neither side has answered comes into view. If 62 percent goes to running the society, what share of the rest, after whatever else is deducted, actually reaches the songwriters and performers it exists to pay?
The Namibian Society of Composers and Authors of Music, known as NASCAM, is the only body Namibia’s government has ever recognised to collect and distribute royalties for the broadcast, public performance and private copying of music. It describes itself on its own website as the country’s only Collective Management Organisation. Over nineteen months of public reporting, examined here against the statute that creates it, NASCAM’s own officials have put four different figures on the record, in four different capacities, and none of the four has been reconciled against any of the others.
What the law actually requires#
NASCAM operates under the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, as amended by the Business and Intellectual Property Authority Act of 2016. Part III of that Act does not treat collection and distribution as separate jobs. Section 56(3)(b) says a collecting society can only be recognised in the first place if its own constitution provides adequately for “the collection on behalf of, and the accounting and distribution to, its members of royalties or other remuneration accruing by reason of the use of works or performances.” Collecting is one half of a single legal duty; paying out is the other half of the same sentence.
Section 58 backs that duty with a paper trail. Every recognised society “shall cause proper accounts to be kept of all royalties or other remuneration collected by it on behalf of its members and the manner in which such royalties or other remuneration has been distributed or otherwise applied,” audited annually by a registered public accountant. Section 59 gives the regulator teeth: if the Business and Intellectual Property Authority’s Board receives information that a society is failing in its distribution duty under section 56(3)(b), or has not complied with the section 58 accounting requirement, it can demand written representations within 21 days and, if unsatisfied, withdraw recognition and cancel the society’s certificate outright. BIPA’s Board took over this power from the Minister of Information and Broadcasting under the 2016 amendment; nothing in the public record checked for this piece suggests that power has ever been exercised against NASCAM.
Two collection totals, two different stories#
The collection side of NASCAM’s ledger has at least two disclosed totals, for different periods, that do not obviously square with each other. A June 2025 consultation document published by BIPA itself, setting out a proposed copyright levy on blank media and storage devices, cites NASCAM’s own figures: N$9,321,914.95 collected in royalties across the twelve years from 2010 to 2022, distributed, the document says, to an estimated 26,562 Namibian artists registered with NASCAM.
Separately, a report published 11 February 2025 quotes NASCAM chief executive Albert Nicanor giving a single-year figure: N$13,330,698 collected in royalty payments from music users for the 2023/24 financial year alone, more than the entire twelve-year total above, if both numbers are accurate as reported. Nicanor did not say how much of that had reached members. “The royalty distribution process is currently underway,” he said, citing a lack of capable human resources, manual processes and funding as the obstacles. Whether collection genuinely accelerated that sharply between 2022 and 2023/24, through new categories of licensed user such as telecoms and hospitality businesses, or whether the two figures were compiled on different bases, could not be established from the sources checked.
A rate disputed without a number from either side#
The clearest public argument NASCAM has had about money centres on a single figure: N$2 per broadcast play. Member of Parliament Frederick Shitana raised it on 25 February 2026, at a workshop on Namibia’s draft copyright bill hosted by the Business and Intellectual Property Authority. He said musicians were earning “as little as N$2 per broadcast play,” that the rate had remained unchanged “since independence” in 1990, and called it insulting. The same report notes that questions sent to NASCAM’s then interim chief executive, Ferdinand Gertze, about the rate and about distribution had gone unanswered by the time it was published.
Gertze did answer, a week later. In a report published 2 March 2026, NASCAM’s acting chief executive said plainly: “The N$2 per play figure is not a set rate.” He described an automated system, Cosis Net, that calculates the figure by dividing the year’s total distributable royalty pool across verified broadcaster airplay logs, so that “each song receives an equal allocation per play within the relevant distribution pool.” He also acknowledged that existing legislation falls short on digital platforms and payments. What neither Shitana nor Gertze put on the record, in either report, is the size of that distributable pool itself. A dispute over whether N$2 is fixed or calculated was conducted, on both sides, without the one number that would let an outside reader check either claim.
An inspection tour, then an admission on cost#
NASCAM held its elective annual general meeting on 29 June 2026. Members retained the sitting board for a full three-year term and approved governance, operational and member-welfare reforms, including the appointment of regional field inspectors. Board chairperson Joseph Ailonga told members that a regional inspection tour of Kavango East, Kavango West, Otjozondjupa and Zambezi had turned up widespread non-compliance among commercial music users, with some “not paid or been invoiced for up to three consecutive years.” Members responded by approving stricter collection and payment policies.
Six weeks after that, on 11 July 2026, Ailonga gave reporters a figure that had not surfaced in any earlier report checked for this piece: NASCAM’s administrative costs currently run at 62 percent of what it collects. He set out a plan to raise annual revenue to N$15 million within two years while capping operating expenditure at N$6 million, a combination he said “would let Nascam distribute 70% of its collections to rights holders.” Read against the 62 percent figure he gave in the same breath, that target implies rights holders are not seeing anything close to 70 percent of collections under the structure running today. No source checked for this piece states what share they are actually seeing. This record does not supply that number either, because nobody named in it has published one; what it does establish is that NASCAM’s own board chairperson, for the first time in the reporting examined here, put a specific cost figure on the record, and that the figure he chose to compare it against was not the society’s current distribution share but a future target.
What this means for artists#
If you are a Namibian songwriter, composer or performer, NASCAM remains the only body with the legal standing to collect broadcast, public-performance and private-copying royalties on your behalf, and the statute backs that distribution duty with an annual-audit requirement and a regulator that can, in theory, withdraw recognition over it. None of that changes what you can verify about your own payout. The per-play rate you may have been quoted is, on NASCAM’s own account, not a fixed number but an output of a calculation this desk could not independently check, since the inputs to that calculation, the size of the distributable pool and the volume of verified airplay, have not been published. Ask NASCAM directly for the distributable-pool figure behind any payment you receive, and for the audited distribution total for the most recent financial year, both of which the Act requires it to keep on record for inspection by its own members under section 58.
If you licence Namibian repertoire from outside the country, NASCAM is the collection point for local statutory tariffs, not a rights registry; its coverage was not checked here, and it says nothing about who owns or administers a specific work.
Namibia is not an isolated case among small, state-recognised collecting societies on this continent making a promise and then changing the subject. Lesotho’s LESCOSAA promised a 2027 payout and then, three weeks later, named no date at all, and Niger’s BNDA told musicians a payout was coming “soon” in February 2026, only for its next public act, in May, to be a meeting about the law instead. What distinguishes Namibia’s record is that NASCAM has, for once, put a specific cost number on the table. It has just not yet put the matching distribution number next to it.
