By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14

Institutions do not weigh decisions; people do. The oil file passed from one experienced hand to another.

Institutions do not weigh decisions; people do. The question of whether Namibia’s largest pension fund should back oil and gas sits with a small number of operators, and in 2024 it passed from one experienced hand to another as the Government Institutions Pension Fund changed chief executives.

The current holder of the file is Martin Inkumbi, who took over as GIPF chief executive in January 2024 and has said the fund has no firm decision on oil. His predecessor, David Nuyoma, had already opened the question. Between them they define how the fund thinks about a bet it has not yet made.

The banker who inherited the question

Inkumbi arrives with a developmental-finance background rather than a pure markets one. He led the Development Bank of Namibia for a decade and worked earlier at the central bank and a commercial bank, a record built on lending into the domestic economy and weighing project risk over long horizons. That is a useful lens for a slow, illiquid oil decision.

It also shapes his caution. A development banker is trained to test whether a project can service its own risk before funding it, and Inkumbi’s public language, monitoring rather than committing, reflects that habit applied to a pension book that cannot afford a speculative loss.

A development banker reads an oil bet as a project to stress-test, not a trend to join.

The predecessor who opened the file

The oil question did not begin with Inkumbi. David Nuyoma, who led GIPF for a decade until his contract ended in 2023, had already said the fund was consulting stakeholders to judge the right time to enter, weighing returns against risk. He set the framing that his successor inherited: enter carefully, or not at all.

Nuyoma’s tenure also built some of the machinery the decision needs, including programmes to widen the local asset-management base. Whatever the fund decides on oil, it does so with institutions and habits shaped over his long watch, which is why the handover matters to the outcome.

The question was framed by one operator and inherited, open, by the next.

Continuity over personality

A pension fund is deliberately built so that no single chief executive can bet it alone. Investment committees, trustees and the regulator all sit between an idea and an allocation, which means the oil decision is a collective operator problem, not a personal one. The change at the top tests whether that continuity holds.

So far it appears to. The fund’s position under Inkumbi, careful and non-committal, reads as a continuation of Nuyoma’s framing rather than a break from it. For members, that steadiness across a leadership change is reassuring in a way a bold new direction would not be.

The strength of the fund is that no one operator can move it alone.

What the operators are judged on

The people running GIPF will not be measured on whether they bought oil, but on whether they protected members while deciding. That means sizing any exposure prudently, explaining the reasoning, and resisting the pressure to treat a national resource as a patriotic obligation rather than an investment on its merits.

It is an unglamorous standard. The operator who says no to a popular bet, or yes only in a small and reversible way, earns little applause but keeps the pension safe. Continuity, judgement and restraint are the qualities the moment asks of them.

The operators will be judged on prudence, not on boldness.

For a trustee, a member or a peer institution, the oil question is finally a question about people: who holds the file, what they have done before, and whether they will size a bet to the pension rather than to the excitement around it. The decision facing Inkumbi and his board is how much of members’ security to expose to a resource the country has only just found.

Sources: The Namibian; Martin Inkumbi appointed as new GIPF CEO (The Brief); David Nuyoma (Wikipedia)