By Gibel Boye
The new board inherits both goodwill and a hard mandate. What it chooses to publish in its first six months will decide whether the next decade holds.
On 3 June, a new board took office at Telecom Namibia under the chairmanship of Fimanekeni Petrus, with a new chief executive due to follow on 1 July.
The language around the appointment has been the familiar language of transformation: stronger governance, modernised infrastructure, a better experience for customers.
Last week in these pages I argued that Namibia’s real challenge is one of infrastructure architecture, not simply telecom operations.
If that is the right diagnosis, then transformation is less an event than a discipline, and the appointment of this board is the moment that discipline begins.
I write as someone building digital infrastructure on the other side of the continent, and from that vantage one thing is clear. Markets, citizens and partners no
longer judge an institution by the ambition of its strategy. They judge it by what it is willing to measure in public. For the new board, the most important decisions
of the next decade will be made in the next six months, and most of them are decisions about transparency.
Start with milestones. Vision statements are easy to write and impossible to fail. Milestones are the opposite. I would encourage the board to publish, early and plainly, a short list of concrete commitments with dates attached.
Not twenty. Five or six that genuinely matter, each with a deadline and an owner. The orderly handover to the incoming chief executive is the first of them.
After that, the things customers actually feel: where coverage will improve, which services will be restored or upgraded, and what the company will stop doing as much as what it will start. A milestone with a date is a promise the public can hold you to. A milestone without one is a press release.
Then resilience, and here Namibia carries a recent and painful lesson. In December 2024 the company lost control of a vast volume of customer data to a ransomware group, after which the records of hundreds of thousands of Namibians, and a long list of institutions, were exposed. The damage was not only
technical. It was a withdrawal from the account of public trust, and that account is far harder to refill than any balance sheet. For this board, resilience can no longer sit inside an IT report that nobody reads.
It belongs at board level. I mean resilience in the full sense: the security of customer data, the speed with which an incident is detected and contained, network uptime under stress, and the financial strength to absorb a shock without passing it to the customer. The board should
decide what it measures, set a baseline honestly, and report against it. An institution that can name its own weaknesses is already stronger than one that hides them.
This is where the architectural decisions the board will be tempted to rush actually live. Resilience is not bought after a breach. It is designed in, at the layer where choices are made about systems, data, security and the people who run them.
Decisions taken quietly in the first six months, about how data is held, how systems connect to one another, and where sovereignty over that data sits, will either give the next decade a foundation or a fault line.
The board’s task is to make sure those decisions are made deliberately and in the open, rather than defaulted into under pressure.
The third commitment ties the first two together: a public reporting cadence. Most state enterprises report once a year, late, in a document written to satisfy auditors rather than inform citizens.
I would urge this board to do something braver and simpler. Report every quarter, in plain language, against the milestones and the resilience metrics it has set for itself. Say what was achieved, what slipped, and why.
A predictable rhythm of honest disclosure does something no marketing campaign can. It teaches the public that the institution can be trusted with bad news, which is the only foundation on which it can ever be trusted with good news.
For a company owned by the nation, that cadence is not a courtesy. It is the relationship.
None of this is unique to Namibia, and that is the point. Across the continent, the institutions winning back confidence are not the ones with the boldest slogans.
They are the ones that have learned to be measured in public, to treat resilience as a promise rather than a department, and to report on a clock that the public can set its watch by.
The architectural decisions of any board look impressive on the day they are announced. Whether they still hold up in ten years depends entirely on whether anyone outside the boardroom can watch them working, quarter after quarter.
So my message to the new board is not a warning. It is an invitation. You have inherited goodwill, a capable team and a country that wants you to succeed. Spend that goodwill on transparency while it is still fresh. Publish the milestones.
Measure the resilience. Set the reporting cadence and keep to it, especially when the numbers are uncomfortable. Do that, and in six months you will not need to tell Namibians that transformation is underway.
They will be able to see it for themselves. And the rest of the continent, which is watching more closely than you might think, will have one more example of an African institution that rebuilt trust the hard way, in the open.
*Gibel Boye is the founder and chief executive of Gesco Group, a digital infrastructure company building across Africa.
