By Dhiladhila Magazine · February 2026

A deposit guarantee fund stays invisible until a bank fails – and by then it is too late to build one.

A deposit guarantee fund is one of those institutions that stays invisible until the day a bank fails, and by then it is too late to build. In the year to December 2025 the fund that underwrites Namibian savers grew to N$40.1 million, and the person steering that growth has been its acting head, Petrus Shifotoka, whose management of the fund is the reason the country could lift its cover at all.

The work is unglamorous by design. A guarantee fund earns its keep not in a good year but in a bad one, when a depositor whose bank has collapsed discovers whether the promise behind their account was funded or merely printed. Shifotoka’s tenure has been about making that promise something a saver can actually rely on when it matters most.

The mandate few savers notice

The authority exists to make a single assurance credible: that if a member bank fails, ordinary depositors will be repaid up to a set limit. It is a backstop, not a bank, and its worth is measured entirely by whether it can pay when it is called upon. That places a particular kind of pressure on whoever is asked to run it day to day.

Shifotoka has held the acting leadership through the fund’s formative phase, when the authority was still proving that a small and young pool of money could be managed with the discipline of a much older one. The mandate is conservative by nature, and by every available measure he has chosen to treat it exactly that way.

A guarantee fund is judged on the day it pays, not the years it quietly waits.

Growing the pool without chasing yield

Under his watch the fund reached N$40.1 million by December 2025, built on what the authority described as conservative investment and operational efficiency rather than aggressive positioning. An 8% return is respectable for a mandate that cannot afford to gamble with the very money meant to reassure savers in the middle of a crisis.

The restraint is the whole point. A guarantee fund that reached for higher returns by taking on more risk would undercut its own reason to exist, because the losses would tend to arrive precisely when depositors needed the cover most. His approach has been to build the pool slowly, keep it liquid and keep it safe.

The fund’s job is to be dull, solvent and available – in that order.

From N$25,000 to N$50,000

The clearest outcome of that steady build is the decision to double the guarantee. Coverage rose from N$25,000 to N$50,000 per depositor, a move that only a sufficiently funded authority can credibly make. Raising the promise without the reserves to honour it would be worse than leaving the old limit untouched.

For most account holders the higher limit means their everyday balances are now fully protected, which is the kind of reassurance a young banking public quietly needs. The increase reads as a routine administrative notice, but it rests on years of the fund being managed carefully enough to afford it.

Doubling the cover is easy to announce and hard to fund – the funding is the story.

Why stewardship is the real metric

Shifotoka’s record invites a different way of measuring a public official than the usual one. There is no ribbon to cut and no building to name; there is only a fund that is larger, safer and able to keep a bigger promise than it could a year earlier. In financial stewardship, that is close to the entire job.

It also sets an expectation for whoever eventually holds the role permanently. The bar is now a fund managed conservatively enough to grow and be trusted, not one stretched for headline returns. Continuity of that discipline matters more to a saver than any single decision an incoming custodian might announce.

Good stewardship leaves the next custodian a stronger fund and a harder act to follow.

For a Namibian saver, the practical signal is that balances up to N$50,000 now sit behind a fund that has been managed to honour them. For anyone weighing the country’s financial plumbing, the decision Shifotoka’s tenure puts on the table is whether to keep rewarding the quiet, conservative stewardship that is only ever noticed when it is absent.

Sources: Deposit guarantee fund grows to N$40.1m (Nampa); Bank of Namibia