One thing I have noticed over the years is how easily we confuse activity with action. We establish committees. We hold consultations. We produce reports. We discuss strategies for the elderly, social welfare, poverty alleviation and inclusion. Yet somewhere in a bank account, an insurance fund, a pension scheme or an investment portfolio, an elderly Namibian is sitting without money that already belongs to them.
The conversation around elder care often starts in the wrong place.
We talk about new programmes when we should be talking about access. We discuss future interventions when we have not fixed existing administrative failures. We debate budgets while billions of dollars in dormant financial assets remain trapped in systems that ordinary citizens cannot navigate.
Whenever these debates come up, I find myself coming back to a simple question: What is the fastest way to improve the life of an elderly person today?
The answer may be simpler than we think. Find their money and return it to them.
I say this as a tracer with over a decade of experience. People may suspect that money is due to them, but have no idea where to begin.
Across Namibia, there are unclaimed pension benefits, forgotten insurance payouts, dormant investment funds and inactive bank accounts. Behind every one of those entries on a financial ledger is a human story. Maybe it is a retired teacher who changed address to Henties Bay. A former Fishcor worker whose records became fragmented after being laid off. A widow who never knew her husband had a policy or where he had it. A family that used to receive the money through a trust, but now lack the knowledge (or airtime) to navigate a complicated claims process.
For many elderly citizens, these funds are not a bonus. They are the difference between buying food and going hungry. Between collecting medication and postponing treatment. Between dignity and dependence. The problem is not that these monies exist. The problem is that the system appears designed to wait rather than to find. This is where consumer protection and elder care become the same conversation.
A business, whether a bank, insurance company, or even a burial society, may argue that information is incomplete, or the customer failed to contact them to update their contact details, or that records are outdated or there are administrative difficulties. I understand those challenges are real from my experience as a tracer working for companies that want to get more information that will allow communication between them and a client.
However, during the decade I have been doing tracing, I realised that even this process is sometimes flawed. When the company is not able to “validate” these tracing particulars, because the calls to validate are made during working hours, or come from a corporate number that the beneficiary might believe is a debt collector, the record is passed on to the Master of the High Court. This then becomes the beneficiary's “problem”.
Since March 2026, I have digitised the Government Gazettes published between 2014 and 2026 and shared them across social media, newspaper comments and television. I noticed that once beneficiaries have this information, the obstacles of collecting it become even bigger. Collecting a claim form becomes incredibly difficult if you do not reside in Windhoek or Oshakati. Handing in the claim form to the fund administrator sometimes means finding ways to get it to the place where their offices are located. Not every town has an Old Mutual, Metropolitan or Alexander Forbes branch. I have come to believe that handing over the monies to the Master’s Office might make it harder to collect, not easier.
Coming back to the institutions holding these monies, we should also recognise that businesses have little incentive to spend money searching for beneficiaries. Every year that funds remain unclaimed, those monies remain within systems that can support investments, cash flow and day-to-day operations. That does not make businesses evil. It simply reflects the reality that companies are structured to protect their assets and manage costs. That is precisely why independent oversight matters.
That is precisely why governments exist. Businesses are designed to protect their money. Citizens need government to protect theirs.
The Administration of Estates Act of 1965 recognised this principle decades ago. The legislation provides mechanisms for unclaimed monies to be published in government gazettes and transferred to the Master of the High Court. The intention was clear. Financial institutions were not supposed to become permanent custodians of forgotten consumer assets. The challenge is that compliance becomes extremely difficult to verify.
Put yourself in the shoes of a pensioner who discovers that money belonging to them was classified as unclaimed years ago. How would that person know whether genuine attempts were made to contact them? How would they know whether the money continued earning interest fairly throughout that period? How would anyone outside the institution verify that reasonable tracing efforts took place before the funds were handed over as unclaimed? The reality is that most consumers cannot answer those questions because the information sits inside private administrative systems. The result is an information gap. And whenever consumers are forced to make decisions without access to the same information as the institution holding their money, they start at a disadvantage.
Over the years, my work in data systems has repeatedly shown me that most governance failures are not caused by a lack of legislation. They are caused by a lack of information visibility. The solution therefore does not lie in making another report, but rather in creating infrastructure.
I have proposed before, and do so once again, that Namibia establish a national unclaimed assets register that integrates information from pension funds, insurers, banks, unit trusts, deceased estates and other financial institutions. Participation by businesses should be mandatory and reporting should be standardised. The information should be searchable by citizens through secure digital and physical channels.
If a pension fund, insurance company or bank simply reports the surname, initials and a benefit amount and publishes them in a location, it does not mean much to a consumer. It should report it into a unified system and participate in tracing programmes. Banks should not simply classify accounts as inactive. They should see it as their responsibility to contribute information that assists with reunification efforts.
As I worked through years of Government Gazettes, one question kept bothering me: why is the pensioner expected to find the money, instead of the money finding the pensioner? Once funds have been handed to government administration, the process should change completely. An elderly citizen should not have to travel, make dozens of phone calls or navigate unfamiliar bureaucracy to recover assets that already belong to them. If government can match taxpayers to tax records, vehicle owners to licence renewals and citizens to identity documents, surely it can use the same tools to reunite people with their own money. The real test of the system is not whether the information was published somewhere. The real test is whether reasonable efforts were made to find the person before expecting the person to find the information.
Within Government and at the Master of the High Court, we need to treat the recovery of unclaimed monies as a national service delivery programme. Because that is exactly what it is. Now I know some people will argue that government has bigger priorities. I disagree. Why? Let me explain: if an elderly Namibian is struggling to buy bread while money legally belonging to them sits inside a dormant account, then that is a priority; if a widow cannot afford transport to a hospital while an unclaimed insurance benefit exists somewhere in the financial system, then that is a priority; if pensioners spend long years navigating bureaucracy to prove ownership of their own assets, then that is a priority.
The real measure of a society is not found in policy documents or strategic plans, but rather it is found in the small moments that affect daily life. The pension that is collected without unnecessary delays. The forgotten bank account reunited with its owner. The insurance benefit, whether pension or death benefit, paid to a family that needs it.
When we speak about caring for the elderly, perhaps the first question should not be how much money the government needs to spend. Perhaps that first question should be how much money already belongs to our senior citizens and why it has not been returned. Because before we create new promises for tomorrow, we should make sure we have delivered what is already owed today. And if we cannot build systems that help an elderly citizen recover their own money, what kind of future are we really building for our children?
Because in the end, the question is not whether the money exists. The question is why the burden of finding it still falls on the people who need it most.
