FirstRand Namibia CFO Lizette Smit once imagined a very different career as a chef. Instead, she found her way into finance, where curiosity, resilience and a willingness to keep pushing herself shaped a career that has already included one CFO role at 27 and another at one of Namibia’s biggest banks
Lizette Smit likes to say things worked out the way they were meant to. That feels plausible when she tells the story of how she ended up in finance, because the route was not nearly as inevitable as her CV now makes it seem.
At school, the FirstRand Namibia CFO thought she might become a chef.
“I had this whole thing, I was going to become a chef,” she says, amused by the memory. It was her father who changed direction. If she studied to become a chef, he told her, she could do that in Namibia. But if she studied accounting, she could go further afield.
The idea stuck.
It was not a purely practical choice. Lizette says she had always liked numbers, problem-solving, and working through complexity. What she enjoys now is not only the discipline of finance itself, but the thinking around it – problem-solving, applying judgement, and helping shape outcomes included. The chef never disappeared entirely, though. She still loves cooking and baking, even if time is tighter these days.
Her route into the profession began with a Deloitte bursary after school. She studied at Rhodes University in South Africa, where she completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, before returning to Namibia to do her articles at Deloitte.
After qualifying, she spent three months in Chicago on secondment, an experience she remembers for the energy of the city and the sense that anything could happen there.
Back in Namibia, she rejoined Deloitte and worked her way up to senior manager. Then, in 2017, one of her clients, Oryx Properties, a company listed on the Namibian Securities Exchange, encouraged her to apply for the CFO role. She was only 27.
A new role and a hard lesson
For Lizette, the attraction went beyond the title, encompassing the opportunity to learn. Oryx was listed, but still small enough to offer exposure well beyond pure finance. In practice, that meant responsibility not just for the numbers, but also for company secretarial work, IT, HR, risk and compliance.
It was a major stretch and one that quickly broadened her sense of what executive responsibility really looks like. It also became the setting for one of the most difficult periods of her career.
Three months after she joined, the CEO she had expected to learn from left. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. To make matters worse, there was the pressure of proving herself in a demanding board environment, often as the only woman and person of colour in the room. She describes the imposter syndrome at that stage as severe. She eventually burnt out badly enough to be booked off for an extended period.
Looking back, she sees it as a low point, but also a necessary one.
“If I hadn’t gone through that, I would have probably burnt out more in my current role because I would have continued on that train of trying to work hard, show up and show more,” she says. “Whereas now I’m like, okay, I only have eight hours. I can only do so much in eight hours. And these are the things in my control.”
The experience forced a broader shift too. Lizette grew up in a home where humility mattered and where speaking up uninvited was not encouraged. That instinct followed her into the workplace. She had to learn, deliberately, how to make her point, how to disagree, and how not to confuse visibility with arrogance.
“I had to do a lot of work to break that down in order to be able to move forward,” she says.
By 2020, she had started asking a different question: Did she want to stay in property for the rest of her career? In Namibia, where industries are smaller and career paths can narrow quickly, she realised that staying in one sector too long could limit her options. So she pivoted, joining FirstRand Namibia, initially as senior finance manager for retail.
It was a significant shift. She had never audited a bank, never worked inside one and had once told herself she would never do so. Banking had seemed too abstract, too far removed from anything tangible. But once inside, she found enjoyable challenges in the complexity, constant learning, regulation and strategy.
Learning to back herself
The move into banking also brought new mentors. Lizette speaks warmly about the leaders who taught her, especially those willing to explain rather than simply instruct. That appetite for learning helped shape her next move too.
When the CFO role at FirstRand Namibia opened up in 2022, her first instinct was hesitation. She felt she needed more time.
An executive coach challenged that thinking. Even applying, she was told, would send a signal. Not applying would send one too. Lizette went through the process and got the role, becoming the first female CFO of FirstRand Namibia in May 2023. Even now, she says, imposter syndrome has not disappeared entirely. What has changed is her ability to recognise it, name it and keep moving anyway.
“I still have moments where I think, sure, am I ready for this or do I know enough?” she says. “But I’ve learnt that sometimes you grow into the role. You don’t always feel ready before the time.”
Today, she leads a sizeable finance structure and describes her management style as detailed but increasingly trust-based. Once someone has shown they can handle the work, she prefers not to hover. She expects people to take responsibility, raise issues when needed and lead their own teams.
It is a style she has had to learn. By her own description, she is a strict perfectionist, and letting go did not come naturally. “I’ve had to learn to trust people and not feel like I have to be in everything all the time,” she says. “At the same time, if something goes wrong, I can’t say it’s someone else’s problem. Ultimately, it still comes back to me.”
That same balance shows up in the way she defines success. It is less about title than about impact. Her measure is whether the institution is better for her being there in culture, people, process and performance.
She is equally realistic about what the role demands. What worries her, she says, is not the ordinary noise of a difficult week, but the much bigger prospect of being part of a leadership team that lets the ship go down. At the same time, she has become more protective of the boundaries she once ignored. She now knows that doing more is not always the same as doing better.
Fully present
Outside the office, life is full. She has two young children, early starts to most days and a schedule that requires deliberate choices. Before her second maternity leave, she still found time for Pilates twice a week. She reads when she can, usually in fragments rather than long stretches.
And then there is another side of her that does not obviously fit the image of a bank CFO: she used to do Brazilian jiu-jitsu with her husband and still talks about it with real enthusiasm.
“What I liked about it was that you can’t think about anything else while you’re doing it,” she says. “You have to be completely present. There’s no space to think about work or anything else. It’s just the next move.”
