Defendants in the Windhoek High Court challenge by Ganja Users of Namibia (GUN) have revealed in their special plea submissions that the Namibian government is currently reviewing contentious legislation that bans the use and possession of cannabis in the country and invited the plaintiffs to make contributions to the process.
This disclosure on Friday 23 October 2025 came as the case was postponed to 12 November 2025 due to the alleged non-appearance of the plaintiff’s counsel, with 7 November 2025 as the date by which the parties have to file a joint status report. This is intended to explore probable avenues of common ground between the litigants.
Five government entities are defendants in the lawsuit under the umbrella of the Office of the Government Attorney: the Prosecutor-General, the Inspector-General of the Namibian Police(Nampol), the ministers of health and justice and the government itself; GUN President Brian Jaftha and Secretary General Borro Ndungula are the plaintiffs.
In motivating for its special plea, the government has canvassed witness statements from medical and public health experts as well as stakeholders including the Christian Coalition of Churches of Namibia, all of whose submitted views are in opposition to GUN’s arguments.
Of significance is a witness statement by the Nampol Inspector-General in opposing GUN’s demand that cannabis use be lifted on constitutional grounds. He testifies that a bill has already been developed at the executive level whose purpose is to allow cannabis use under certain circumstances.
However, in a statement on behalf of Nampol Inspector-General Lieutenant-General Joseph Shikongo, senior police official Shapwa Elias Shapwa, in support of the special plea, argues that the matter is the prerogative of the government and the legislature. He avers that any court victory for the plaintiffs will be prejudicial to the state because there will not be the necessary legal framework to regulate such use.
Government filed a special plea at the beginning of the trial, which got underway in the Windhoek High Court on 2 July. It argued the GUN matter was unripe to be heard before a court of law, citing that the cannabis debate was purely a civil society matter currently under the adjudication of the country’s Law Reform and Development Commission (LRDC). The LRDC later emerged as the sixth defendant.
Shapwa, a detective for Nampol, states that his organisation and the Ministry of Home Affairs, Safety and Security were in the process of reviewing the Abuse of Dependence-Producing Substances and Rehabilitation Centres Act 41 of 1971 (RSA), also known as “the Impugned Act”. It is especially this piece of legislation that GUN has targeted for being unconstitutional for its blanket prohibitionist provisions.
GUN also opposes it for being an antiquated relic of colonial-era rule under South Africa prior to 1990, inconsistent with independent and modern Namibia. GUN also wants cannabis to be delisted from the Medicines and Related Substances Act 101 of 1965 (“the Medicines Act”).
The lengthiest of the defendant witness statements is from a director in the Ministry of Health, Johannes Gaeseb. He argues that public health policy as determined by the ministry should take precedence. He also contends that the GUN application was at variance with government public policy positions aimed at prioritising general public health and the public interest. This is as GUN’s application calls for cannabis’ decriminalisation on constitutional grounds, citing the right to religious freedom and spiritual practice.
However, the ministry counters that the monitoring of such selective spiritual empowerment would be untenable because religious use would be difficult to prove.
The Nampol Inspector-General advances the same selective use argument while however, rejecting scientific evidence that disputes a causal link between cannabis use and crime. His evidence alerting to the risk of an increase in domestic violence were cannabis use to be decriminalised contradicts research that among others indicates alcohol as having more dire societal consequences.
Namibia is the only country in its corner of southern Africa still to decriminalise cannabis use on medicinal or industrial grounds, with Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe having adopted friendly legislation. Botswana has already partially legalised.
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