From Kitchener in Canada to Dublin in Ireland before landing a plum job as chief financial officer of the Namibia Institute of Pathology, Scholastika Mwetulundila’s meteoric career path is not what she thought it would be.
The story of Scholastika Mwetulundila sounds like a fairy tale or an extract from a motivational speaker’s playbook – a woman born and who grew up in the remotest village in Northern Namibia saw her career traversing her around the world, including stints in Canada and Ireland. At 33, Scholastika was appointed as the chief financial officer of the Namibian Institute of Pathology.
The Namibia Institute of Pathology is a state-owned enterprise that provides pathology services to public and private health sectors from over 36 medical laboratories it operates across Namibia.
Scholastika’s meteoric career path is not what she anticipated while she was growing up. In high school, she studied science and her family wanted her to become a medical doctor but concedes that it was her own beliefs that urged her to consider the accounting route.
The tipping point in her career choice occurred when she saw a poster from The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Namibia (ICAN) plastered on her Grade 8 classroom wall which was promoting the chartered accounting field.
“That was never a hard choice for me because I loved numbers and was doing pretty well in high school,” she recalls.
After matriculating in 2005, she enrolled at the University of Namibia for a four-year degree and went on to South Africa to do a bridging course and a CTA post-graduate qualification at Rhodes University.
The beginning of great things
She served her articles at Deloitte where she worked mainly with clients in the banking, financial services, mining, healthcare and telecommunications sectors. She qualified as a chartered accountant in 2015, an achievement that she regards as the highlight of her career.
“That moment opened doors and made the world my oyster. Though I still regard it as a major milestone, it actually signalled the beginning of great things to come and placed my career on a growth trajectory,” she says.
The CA qualification did turbo charge her career, which saw her taking a secondment to Canada in the middle of winter to the small city of Kitchener on the outskirts of the Greater Toronto Area “The assignment was from January to April and the timing was terrible. I relocated from a place where temperatures were hovering in the mid 30°C to a city where the mercury plunged to -20°C,” she says laughing.
She returned to Deloitte and served in several roles before she joined the EY financial services team in Dublin, Ireland, in 2019, before she was head hunted for her current role.
“After resigning from Deloitte in 2019 to take up the Irish offer at EY, I flew back home and took an 800km drive to my village with just me and my thoughts, wondering whether I have made the right decision,” she reminisces.
Though an 800km drive alone might sound daunting to many, Scholastika reveals that she enjoys long drives as she finds them relaxing and therapeutic.
Overcoming challenges
Scholastika waxes lyrical about her tenure in Dublin and points out that her tenure in Dublin deepened her expertise when she was assigned to work on the accounts of EY’s blue chip clients such as Google Payments, Facebook Payments and Western Union. She also did a three-month secondment in the consulting division of EY to Bank of Ireland (BoI) where she learnt a great deal about European banking regulations. I had a great time in Europe and travelled extensively between Dublin and the UK because it was visa free at that time,” she says.
But even that journey was not without its heartaches. “The outbreak of Covid-19 affected me on a personal level. I lost a brother and a dear friend and I could not attend their funerals because of the travel restrictions at the time,” she says.
Returning to Namibia to assume her new role, Scholastika concedes that it was a hard landing at first, having to adjust to the transition from working with listed companies in Europe and Namibia to running the finances at a publicly owned entity.
“What kept me going was my love and passion for serving my country. The acting CFO left a week after I joined and I didn’t have a senior manager to support me and do a proper handover. I had to build and shape my own team. Secondly, as I am also responsible for supply chain at the NIP, I found the red tape and bureaucracy in the public sector very frustrating and inefficient – everything has to go through public procurement and rigorous processes ,” she says, adding that some decisions are protracted which leads to operational inefficiency.
“Before I joined the public entity, I didn’t realise how much of a burden public healthcare is to the Namibian Government, thus I really appreciate our government for the ability to be able to provide healthcare services to its people and in some cases the neighbouring countries and those at the border benefit from using our public hospitals,” she said.
A rewarding journey
Scholastika points out that the work she does has a direct bearing on people at grassroots levels, particularly the most vulnerable population that cannot afford access to private medical aid. According to the Namibia Financial Institutions Supervisory Authority (Namfisa), out of Namibia’s three million-strong population, only approximately seven percent can afford to pay for private medical aid, excluding government employees.
“We provide services to the most vulnerable members of society including my own family members in the village and those without private medical aids. This is what I find very fulfilling and rewarding at the end of the day. Our role as the intermediary between healthcare providers and the population, means that without expedient test results from our labs, our doctors are unable to treat patients. This is one of the aspects of my job that I find to be very satisfying and take very seriously,” she says.
Notwithstanding the sense of fulfilment she derives from her role, Scholastika concedes that the skills gap in the public sector is one of the bugbears she had to contend with.
“Throughout my career I have worked in professional environments full of CAs on listed companies and this has somewhat put me in a bubble. In the public sector you work with different skill sets, not just on your team but where most people don’t have prior public sector work experience – such as laboratory scientists and sometimes even in the boardroom and at top management level,” she says.
“I have learnt one of the most important lessons in leadership, which is the need to understand everyone’s perspective and the factors that inform it. It’s all about accepting that not everyone is a finance expert and people have varied expertise – leadership then becomes how you crystallise these different skills sets towards a common purpose, in the end understanding your audience at all times becomes key,” she adds.
She is grateful and proud about returning to Namibia, exuding pride when she talks about the impeccable road conditions, the country’s zero tolerance to malfeasance and the provision of public services.
“Namibia, like many other countries, has a long way to go, however the provision of public services in Namibia is admirable, from road infrastructure which has incubated a culture of long drives in the country, to provision of clean water and electricity, even in some remote villages. I am hard pressed to think of a time where I had to schedule my activities around water or electricity availability, even in my home village,” she states matter-of-factly.
Despite having travelled to the Americas and Europe, Scholastika’s love for Africa and the rich tapestry of diverse cultures on the continent is infectious. “I love to travel and interact with different cultures and learn how different people across Africa do things,” she concludes.
