When Bank of Namibia Governor Johannes !Gawaxab recently admitted that local ownership and control in our financial sector has reached only 20% against a 25% target set a decade ago, he was not merely stating a statistic, he was laying bare an uncomfortable truth. Namibia’s financial services sector, the backbone of any modern economy, remains far too dependent on and beholden to foreign capital and interests.
For ten years, we have tinkered at the edges of transformation. We have introduced localisation quotas, promoted local talent into top management, and celebrated the listing of banks on our stock exchange. Yet beneath this veneer of progress lies an inconvenient reality: our financial system continues to be a conduit for wealth extraction, with profits flowing out of Namibia to build other nations, notably South Africa.
The dominance of South African-owned banks and insurers in Namibia is not simply a matter of ownership. It is a matter of economic leakage. Every year, billions in profits are repatriated to Johannesburg and Cape Town, capital that could have been reinvested in Namibian industries, infrastructure, and people.
While South Africa grows its economy and empowers its citizens with the dividends earned here, Namibia is left with crumbs. This dynamic is not just an economic imbalance; it is an erosion of our sovereignty.
True Namibianisation is not about window-dressing with token shares or cosmetic appointments. It is about keeping Namibian capital in Namibia, circulating, multiplying, and creating opportunities for our entrepreneurs, our youth, and our communities.
The Financial Sector Transformation Strategy for 2025–2035 is a welcome step, but strategies do not change realities unless they challenge entrenched structures. Localization, merely meeting ownership quotas, will not deliver economic justice if the underlying business models remain extractive.
Real transformation must ask hard questions:
- Why do our banks continue to channel the lion’s share of their profits to foreign parent companies?
- Why are local businesses, particularly in rural and informal sectors, still underserved despite these banks’ decades-long presence?
- Why is Namibian pension capital still managed primarily by offshore entities, investing more abroad than at home?
Unless these structural leakages are plugged, we will remain a financial colony, an economy where value is created locally but harvested elsewhere.
To achieve true Namibianisation, we must do more than legislate. We must strategically re-engineer the sector:
- Mandate Retention of Capital: Set regulations requiring a significant portion of profits generated in Namibia to be reinvested locally.
- Empower Local Asset Managers: Channel pension and investment funds toward Namibian-owned financial institutions that reinvest domestically.
- Support Indigenous Financial Institutions: Create incentives, from tax breaks to preferential procurement, for wholly Namibian-owned banks and insurers to thrive.
- Invest in Human Capital: Develop a pipeline of Namibian talent not just to fill management positions, but to lead innovation in fintech, asset management, and risk underwriting.
This is not protectionism; it is economic self-determination.
The next decade is critical. Namibia cannot afford another ten years of underperformance while our financial arteries continue to pump wealth into foreign economies. The Financial Sector Transformation Strategy must not only be implemented, it must be radical in its ambition.
We must demand a sector where ownership is not symbolic, where decision-making is not remote, and where every dollar generated here works to uplift Namibians. Only then can we say we have truly Namibianised our financial system.
Until that day, we remain the financiers of everyone but ourselves.
