By Melkies Ausiku
I thought long and hard before writing this piece, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since I began my entrepreneurial adventure. The ride-hailing service LEFA, which launched in 2018, has grown steadily and has become a mainstay in Windhoek, our capital city. By using the LEFA application, a rising number of passengers can be swiftly and securely transported to their destination.
We went from having no clients to finishing nearly 200,000 rides in only five short years, and we’re still expanding. As a business, we even survived the pandemic and significant gasoline price rises while educating Namibians on how to use modern technology. The Namibian company LEFA is tenacious, youthful, and well-established, and it fits all the criteria for the kind of business that we constantly hear about as being necessary for our nation. By allowing people to choose to take a LEFA, which they increasingly do, LEFAs help to create a better society by reducing the incidence of drunk driving accidents. So what exactly is the issue?
One thing that has become abundantly clear is that success, growth, and starting as a small organisation with an excellent product and executing it successfully means little. When trying to access funding, partners or even loans to grow the business, most doors stay shut. The reasons given are the loan amount requested is not sufficiently large to be lucrative or of interest to investors. The return on investment may take to too long, investors often want ‘quick money’, or simply, people would rather spend their money on luxuries like suvs or real estate. All perfectly understandable. However, if we are serious as a nation about building up our country, leveraging and monetizing new technology and stimulating young entrepreneurs to create businesses and employment, we need to know that the relevant financial institutions have our backs. Believe me when I say we have created employment. We have over 50 drivers working through the LEFA app, ensuring people get home safely every day, 7 days a week. LEFA is not looking for hundreds of millions of dollars invested, but taking it to the next level, using electric vehicles and creating safe and climate-neutral transportation solutions should be top of mind in Namibia, as it is in every country.
Without the local financial backing and scarcity of partners, apart from Namibia Breweries, who have been with us from the beginning, LEFA has had to look for financing from elsewhere. This meant that a 100% Namibian-owned company, started from scratch, by Namibians, has had to sell equity stakes to foreign investors, as they saw and see the future potential of LEFA as an all-around transportation company. LEFA is grateful for the investors that have come on board but would have preferred to see Namibian organisations invest in the company. The proof of concept is there, with five years of growth under our belt in some of the most adverse economic conditions globally, and certainly, locally, you would imagine LEFA to be a prime candidate for investment. It just made me wonder, what will it take for Namibians to invest in Namibian companies, right now I don’t have a clear answer. Which is a sad situation.
