By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14

A number this large reads as an impersonal force. It moves only when a few named people decide it should.

A figure as large as N$301.9 billion (about US$17.8 billion) can read as an impersonal force, but it moves only when specific people decide it should. Behind the pool sit a small number of allocators – fund chief executives, unlisted-investment managers, external asset managers and the supervisors who set their limits – whose judgement turns a regulation into a deployed rand.

Concentration makes those hands few. With the Government Institutions Pension Fund holding 69.4 per cent of the industry, according to the Namfisa data, the choices of one fund’s leadership shape most of the market. The operators, not the number, are where the pool’s direction is actually set.

The fund chief at the centre

Most of the pool answers to one institution, and that institution to its chief executive. David Nuyoma, who leads GIPF, sits atop the fund whose board and executive set the split between listed, offshore and unlisted assets for two-thirds of the industry. When that fund shifts a percentage point, the whole market feels it.

The fund has framed its unlisted work in developmental terms, describing a ripple-effect that multiplies entrepreneurs and builds a critical mass of sustainable businesses. Whether that ambition is realised depends less on the mandate than on the people asked to execute it.

When one fund holds two-thirds of the market, its executive is a national allocator.

The unlisted-investment desk

The harder, narrower job sits with the unlisted-investments function, which selects special-purpose vehicles and private-equity managers by public tender and deploys development capital on a draw-down basis rather than in a lump sum. It is where a compliance percentage becomes an actual company with staff and a balance sheet.

The desk has long argued its own case. GIPF’s unlisted-investment management has described private equity as a way to deploy domestic savings within the economy to spur growth at home – a rationale that treats the fund as an engine of local enterprise, not merely a holder of securities.

The unlisted desk is where the pool touches the real economy directly.

The external managers and the analysts

A large share of the money is run by outside houses. Sanlam Investments is among them, and its chief executive, Tega Shiimi ya Shiimi, has framed the work as impact investing that pairs social return with shareholder satisfaction. These managers make the day-to-day calls the fund itself delegates.

Independent analysts keep the operators honest. Voices such as financial analyst Arney Tjaronda scrutinise whether the deployment delivers the growth it promises, providing the outside check that a concentrated, largely self-supervised pool badly needs.

The lesson for anyone watching the capital is that it is steered from several desks at once – the fund, its appointed managers and the analysts pressing on results. The headline belongs to the pool; the decisions belong to a scattered handful of named professionals.

The pool is steered as much from asset-management desks as from the fund itself.

The supervisor who draws the box

Above all of them sits Namfisa, which draws the limits every allocator must work within – the 45 per cent domestic floor of Regulation 13 and the unlisted band of Regulations 28 and 29. The supervisor picks no deals, but it decides how much room the operators have to build at home.

That makes the regulator the quietest operator of all. It cannot deploy a rand, yet it sizes the field on which every other allocator plays, and each adjustment it makes redirects billions without touching a single transaction.

The regulator sizes the field; the operators choose the plays.

For anyone backing Namibian enterprise or supervising its savings, the N$301.9 billion is best understood through the handful of allocators who move it – a dominant fund’s executive, its unlisted-investment desk, the external managers and the regulator drawing the box. The decision for a partner or policymaker is whose judgement to influence, because the pool follows its operators, not its headline.

Sources: The Namibian; GIPF eyes new PE investments in Namibia (Africa Global Funds); Unlisted investments enable GIPF to manage risk and create jobs (New Era)