JASON KASUTO
Namibia is transfixed by the oil beneath its ocean. Its greater, and far more certain, fortune lies in the informal settlements it keeps mislabelling as a burden.
Off the coast of Lüderitz, drillships hover over one of the most exciting oil discoveries of the century, and the nation holds its breath for a final investment decision.
A few hundred kilometres inland, on the sandy edge of Windhoek, the corrugated roofs of Havana stretch to the horizon. We are transfixed by the first frontier and quietly embarrassed by the second. I have come to believe we have it precisely backwards.
For a generation we have read Namibia’s informal settlements as a wound to be healed: a housing crisis, a service backlog, a cost the budget cannot bear. That reading is the single most expensive misjudgement in our economic policy.
Those settlements are not a liability sitting on the national balance sheet. They are the largest reserve of untapped capital in the country, and we persist in filing it under “problem”.
The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto gave this phenomenon its name: dead capital. The poor, he observed, are rarely poor because they own nothing. They are poor because what they own is legally invisible.
De Soto estimated that the world’s poor were sitting on trillions of dollars of such frozen wealth, locked out of the formal economy by the absence of a document.
Namibia holds one of the most concentrated reserves of dead capital anywhere on earth. Close to 40% of Namibians live in informal settlements.
Roughly nine in 10 cannot qualify for a mortgage. We require more than half a million homes, and we remain, by most measures, the second most unequal country in the world.
Every one of those silver-roofed homes stands upon land its occupant does not legally own. That is dead capital, at national scale, in plain sight.
Our instinct as a state has been to answer this with construction: to build houses, at a target of 10 thousand a year. To complement this concretely and accelerate hard delivery even more we do not need to invent the mechanism.
We already built it. In 2012 this country passed the Flexible Land Tenure Act, one of the most progressive land laws on the African continent.
Its stated purpose, written into the statute itself, is to grant residents of informal settlements a simpler, cheaper form of title and to empower them economically through those rights.
It created an elegant legal staircase: a starter title that rises to a land hold title and, in time, to full freehold ownership. It is, in effect, a machine for turning a shack into a bankable asset. And then we let it gather dust.
The regulations took six years to finalise. The first titles were issued only in 2021, to roughly nine hundred households, against nearly 135,000 families who need them. A world-class key, fitted to the lock, and abandoned.
The opportunity before us is not to house the poor. It is to bank them. First, title it, converting the Flexible Land Tenure Act from a modest pilot into a national mobilisation, with a digitised land registry and properly resourced land rights offices.
Second, bank it, designing housing finance for the way Namibians actually live: micro-mortgages, incremental loans that finance a room at a time, and credit secured against land hold title.
Third, and most powerfully, fund it with our own money. Our pension funds are already legally required to channel a share of their assets into local, developmental investments, and our largest fund alone has committed tens of billions to alternative assets.
We speak endlessly of the dividend that oil and green hydrogen may one day deliver. But the deepest dividend a nation can pay its people is not a cheque. It is ownership.
This is not a Namibian curiosity. Informal urbanisation is the defining feature of the twenty-first-century developing world, and no country has yet cracked how to convert it into formal capital at scale.
*Jason Kasuto is Managing Director of Monasa Advisory & Associates, a Namibian transaction advisory firm working across capital markets, research and development finance.
