By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 05

Big infrastructure is signed by named people; two of the signatures on Walvis Bay belong to women.

A port is usually described in tonnes and hectares, rarely in the people who financed and governed it. Two women sit inside the Walvis Bay story on opposite sides of the table: Dr Josephine Ngure, the African Development Bank’s deputy director general for southern Africa, on the lending side, and Nangula Hamunyela, a member of Namport’s board, on the owner’s side.

Neither was the public face of the launch – that role fell to the president and the contractors – but both occupy the seats where a megaproject is actually approved and overseen. The terminal that Namibia inaugurated in 2019 passed through decisions each of them helped to carry.

The financier's seat

As deputy director general for the African Development Bank’s southern Africa region, Dr Josephine Ngure worked at the level where the bank’s country portfolios are managed – an office overseeing billions of dollars across scores of active projects in the region. The Walvis Bay terminal, financed largely by an AfDB loan, is exactly the kind of infrastructure such a desk shepherds from appraisal to disbursement.

Her presence at the inauguration was not ceremonial. It marked the lender in a deal where the lender carried most of the capital, and it placed a woman in the room where the terms of Namibia’s largest recent port investment were held to account.

On a loan-funded port, the lender’s representative is a principal, not a guest.

The owner's board

Nangula Hamunyela sits on the other side, as a director of the Namibian Ports Authority, the state-owned entity that owns and must now operate the terminal. A board member’s work is unglamorous and decisive: approving the capital, weighing the debt, and holding management to the plan that justified the spending. Her career spans banking, at Nedbank Namibia, and the oil-and-gas sector, at Engen.

That background is the point. Port governance rewards people who can read a balance sheet and a financing structure, and Hamunyela reached the board through commercial roles rather than political ones. She represents the quiet, fiduciary layer of leadership on which a N$4 billion asset depends.

The board director’s influence is measured in approvals signed, not ribbons cut.

Two functions, not two tokens

What makes the pairing worth noting is that both women hold functional power rather than symbolic positions. One sits where the decision is made to lend and on what terms; the other helps decide whether the borrowing owner spends and governs the money well. These are the two hinges of any financed megaproject, and here both turned partly on women’s judgement.

It is a more useful profile than a diversity headline, because it locates the women where the decisions are, not where the cameras are. The lesson for anyone tracking who leads African infrastructure is to read the lender’s desk and the owner’s board, not only the podium at the opening.

Real influence in a megaproject sits at the lending desk and in the boardroom, not the lectern.

The rising signal

For younger women entering finance, engineering or public enterprise in Namibia, the deal offers concrete rather than aspirational models: named professionals holding named seats on a project of national scale. The path each took – through commercial banking, development finance, corporate management – is visible and repeatable, not so exceptional as to be useless as a guide.

The caution is not to inflate two individuals into a trend. Namibian infrastructure leadership remains far from balanced, and two women in senior seats on one project is a signal rather than a settled shift. It is, however, a real one, attached to real names and a real port.

Two named women in the decisive seats are a signal to build on, not a finish line.

For a mentor, a board-builder or a young professional in Namibia, the Walvis Bay terminal is a reminder that infrastructure leadership is specific and nameable – Ngure at the lender, Hamunyela on the owner’s board. The decision it poses to institutions is whether to keep routing capable women into the financing and governance seats where a port is actually decided, so the next megaproject has more than two of them to name.

Sources: The Namibian; AfDB appoints Dr Josephine Waithira Ngure, Southern Africa (AfDB); Nangula Hamunyela appointed to board (Namibia Economist)