PROFILE: Charles Mpundu: the special one
Charles Mpundu: the special oneBy Amos Malupenga
Sunday February 03, 2008 [03:00]
His name may be little-known or not known at all to members of the public. But it is a huge name in the corporate world, especially in the insurance and pension fund circles.
He played a vital role in stabilising NAPSA to the trillionaire institution it has now become following its transformation from National Pension Fund (NPF) in the late 1990s. Now he is turning around the fortunes of Workers Compensations Fund Control Board as chief executive officer. This institution was on the verge of collapse over a year ago when its board of directors identified his expertise, knowledge and experience, and engaged him to resuscitate it.
You might not know this; but this institution could not have survived three more years, in terms of meeting its obligations, if this man had not been engaged to take charge of its affairs. By the time he was engaged, the board had suspended the then chief executive, his deputy and a financial controller.
Consequently, the board yearned for a man who could combine the roles of the three suspended senior officials. So Charles Mpundu was identified as the man to work as chief executive officer, deputy chief executive and financial controller, among other responsibilities.
Charles, 42, is one of the not more than five Zambians who have studied actuarial science. In fact, he was the first Zambian to venture into this rare profession.
So Charles is the special one because he is from a rare profession whose known practitioners cannot number more than three in Zambia. Read on and find out more about Charles and his rare profession.
Question: To start with, may I thank you for this opportunity. I know I will learn a lot from you at the end of this interview because your profession is very rare and unique. I am told you are an actuary by profession. What is this profession?
Answer: Thank you also for this opportunity and welcome home. Let me start by defining who an actuary is. An actuary is a person who is specialised in mathematics, a special branch of mathematics that focuses on areas of investments, pensions, insurance and applies a lot of probability and statistics; everything coming together in terms of using all the skills to solve real problems in the economy.
So this profession brings together economics and computers. You need a breadth of skills and it cuts across the whole horizon of different professions: law, economics, IT, mathematics and everything else. But primarily, we use a lot of mathematical models and probability in our work. In short, an actuary is a person that makes financial sense of the future using all these other branches and disciplines to come up with practical solutions.
Q: If I may ask, could you tell me the financial future of Zambia?
A: That’s an interesting one but it depends on the information one is given. I may not be privileged to all the models that we may be working with but certainly, you want to build from where you are in terms of what the past has been, the current and certainly the future, taking into account the projections in terms of inflation, interest rates and the general outlook of the economy.
But it becomes a bit tricky in terms of giving a blanket answer. You need to be able to apply to a specific situation. If you tell me, ‘here is an insurance company or pension fund, what do you think its future is?’ Then I can give you better answers. Or you say ‘here is a deal in terms of investment transaction, think of it’. Then I can give you all the projections.
Q: This is a rare course; where is it offered?
A: It’s a rare course and it is not offered in Zambia. Even at the time I took the course in England, there were only two universities offering that. But over the years, a lot more universities have started offering that, even in the UK. Even nearby in South Africa, they are now offering this course at Cape Town University as well as Wits University. Even Zimbabwe is offering this course. But up until 1995, you had to go either to the UK, US, Canada or Australia to study actuarial works.
Q: Seeing that this is a rare course, are you able to tell me how many actuaries there are in Zambia?
A: Well, at the time I did it, I was the only one in Zambia. Now, we have had one or two people who have done that in South Africa at Cape Town University. There could be others that I may not know about but certainly within the market I do not know more than those one or two I referred to earlier.
Q: How did you know about this course?
A: I grew up in a mining town in Chingola and in my early days I wanted to do accountancy. And during those days, if you wanted to do accountancy or ACCA the place to go to was ATC (Accountancy Training College) in Chingola. But because I grew up in Chingola, I didn’t want to be a local boy studying accountancy. Besides, I didn’t think accountancy was challenging enough.
I happened to have come across some people who were accountants and from the work that they were doing, I didn’t think it was challenging enough. Actuarial work does stretch your imagination and brainpower and I wanted something challenging, something that could stretch me. So I thought ‘why not try something different?’ I had to take a risk. It was a gamble because very little was done about actuarial work. The challenge was the major thing driving me.
Q: But how did you know about the existence of this challenging course since it is not offered in Zambia and very rarely abroad?
A: You will find my career very interesting. Initially, I meant to do mechanical engineering. In fact, I was sponsored by ZCCM to do mechanical engineering in the UK. But before I could get to UK, there was a window where ZCCM had their consultants in UK. ZCCM was paying a lot of money to this firm of consultants who were primarily at the time looking at Mukuba Pension Scheme and doing the actuarial valuations for them. From that end, I knew about it. But I had known about it much earlier because one of my brother-in-laws was an accountant running a private firm and I sometimes helped him to do some accounts work. Once in a while, he threw some work to me to assist him.
But for me, I used to find accounts to be very easy and straightforward. And initially, my brother-in-law is the one who mentioned actuarial work to me. He said ‘if you want something more challenging, there is something called actuarial work and so far there has never been any Zambian who has gone in that area’. Then I thought, ‘why not, let me be the first to try it out’.
My ability in mathematics and my love for it drove me in that direction. And I started doing research on this much earlier in secondary school. So I knew about actuarial work from my school days although a lot of people only come to know about it when they are working for an insurance company, a pension fund or investment banking house.
Q: At this point, allow me to trace your roots in terms of educational background. May I know how you climbed the ladder up to the point of studying actuarial science? Of course, I expect you to give me your personal background in the process...
A: My name, simply, is Charles Mpundu. But my late father used to call me Kabwe. It is supposed to be my middle name. In my early days, my friends used to call me George because I was playing football; you know George Best?
I was born on 19th February 1966 so I will be 42 next month (February). I grew up in Chingola where my father was a miner working underground. My mother was basically a housewife although she was knitting baby clothes and other woollen things that ladies used to do.
I grew up in an area called Nchanga North in the G section. Actually, the address was beautiful. It was G 11, right on top of the hill overlooking the open pit. When you are in Chingola, you know where there is the hill and those small houses where the toilet is some 100 metres away? That’s the area.
I am second-born in the family of nine. The eldest sister died some 13 years ago. There are six other boys in between and there are seven of us surviving.
I started school in Chingola. Where the current open pit mine is standing is where I did my welfare system in those days. This is what you are now calling nursery school. It was called Chansa Welfare. But later, they had to raze the community centre to pave way for the open pit mine.
This is where I started my welfare programme around 1970/71. I started my grade one in 1972 at Matero Primary School in Chingola where I went up to grade seven. I finished my grade seven in 1978. I didn’t do well. Well, I did well enough to proceed to form one but not well enough as to proceed to the school of my choice.
My parents said ‘this is not good enough, we want you in boarding school’. So they sent me to a Seventh Day mission school in Kawambwa.
Q: What was the school of your choice?
A: The one I wanted to get into initially was Chikola Secondary School because in Chingola, Chikola was renowned for people who were very good at mathematics, Chingola Secondary School pupils were very good at English then these other people went to Kabundi Secondary School.
So I wanted to get into Chikola because I believed my mathematics was very good. But I didn’t make it because I was a bit playful at the time; we were playing football all over the show and the usual things that you get involved in about grade seven.
That is why my parents decided to take me into a boarding school. The boarding school was very basic and I mean basic to the core. We were feeding on cabbages and beans. And for me, this was a good turning point in my life. This made me realise a lot of things that I had taken for granted in life. To eat fish, you had to do a lot of battering. The local boys would have access to fish and we had to exchange with sugar or something else because we had access to sugar and other baked stuff.
I had to learn to fish and all my bed sheets went because I thought I could use bed sheets to catch fish from the river. I also learnt a few other survival skills. We had to ferry firewood. If you didn’t go out to cut or collect firewood, you couldn’t eat.
I was there up to August 1979 when I said enough was enough and I decided to move on. I actually quit school. When I went back home, I just told my parents that I was not returning to school. I was still doing form one at the time.
Q: Why did you quit school?
A: For a number of reasons. Firstly, I didn’t think the school was good enough. I didn’t find the people there to be challenging enough. I didn’t get the competition that I thought I needed. I turned out to be one of the best students but I didn’t think I was challenged enough.
Arrangements were made for me to move to Kawambwa Boys Secondary School but by then the reputation of the school wasn’t that good. So I decided that I was not going back to Kawambwa. When schools closed during the second term, I remember the date – 13th August – because that is when my sister was born, I just decided I was not going back to Kawambwa.
Q: What was your father’s reaction?
A: It was one of the moments when the family gets tested. My father said he would never talk to me. Mum had to persuade me. She said ‘if you are not doing anything, you might as well go back to school. Since we cannot get you a form one place, why don’t you repeat your grade seven to restart the process so you can go to the school of your choice?’.
And as it turned out, I agreed to that. So I went to Kabundi Primary School to resit my grade seven examinations. I had to resit my grade seven from grade eight or form one as it were then. After that, I made it properly to the school of my choice, which was Chingola Secondary School.
Q: Not Chikola?
A: No, by then I had changed my mind. I went for Chingola this time round. When I went there, I had a choice in terms of which class I wanted to be in because I had done very well. I was told the best class was form one A and the least was form one H. So I was put in the A class and I got the challenge and competition which I was looking for from my colleagues. I remained at Chingola up to form three. This was from 1980 to 1982.
I left Chingola at the end of 1982. That was the time Mpelembe Secondary School was now coming into being. At the time, Mpelembe hadn’t even been built. There was just an announcement that the mines were putting up a secondary school in Kitwe. I visited the sight and found that it was just a bare site. But I was convinced that if the mines had announced that they were going to put up a school, it would be a good school.
A lot of people didn’t think it was going to happen because there was no structure but I had a lot of conviction that it was going to happen. And so I applied to go to Mpelembe and I was in the very first intake, even without the structures.
And people thought I was risking a lot. I had done very well at my form three examinations because I had more than 500 marks. I was getting an average of 94 per cent in each subject.
That’s how I got a scholarship from ZCCM. I got one of the very first scholarships ZCCM gave to Mpelembe pupils. This time I was now going into form four.
Q: What was involved in this scholarship?
A: The scholarships were given to the top 10 students. This covered tuition and boarding fees. The only thing that parents were expected to provide were uniforms. So I was covered in form four and form five.
After the O’levels in 1984, I was again sponsored for A’levels which I did for two years. So for me, it’s like ZCCM was my father from form four up to university. ZCCM looked after me all this time.
I was actually the first head boy of Mpelembe. I set the very first rules for the school; I drafted them. It was a lot more difficult because we didn’t have structures in place. The structures were coming up as we were learning. For those of us who were there, we were actually commuting. I used to commute from Chingola. There were buses provided for pupils coming from all Copperbelt towns. There were only a few boarders at the time and those were accommodated at Wusakile Hospital where the nurses’ quarters are. That is where they took out three or four hostels and used that to accommodate the students. I had to be accommodated later by virtue of being head boy, although everybody else continued to commute.
Q: How did you proceed after form six, after your A’levels?
A: I had a very interesting stint because after my O’levels, I had an opportunity to teach. Those days it was called pupil teaching. Interestingly for me, I decided that instead of teaching at a primary school - which was typical – I said I would teach at a secondary school. I insisted on teaching at Chingola Secondary School but they refused. They said go back to Mpelembe if you want to teach at secondary school. But I believed that even with just an O’level certificate, I was still good enough to teach in secondary school. Eventually, I ended up teaching at a private school. I taught maths and sciences.
When I was doing my A’levels, ZCCM used to provide us with opportunities to gain experience during vacation work. So during such times, I worked underground in the mines, in the pump chamber in Chingola at level 520. That time the thinking was that I was going to do mechanical engineering so I had a lot of exposure to different pumps.
So after my A’levels…In fact, my initial choice was mining engineering but my father could never have me do mining engineering because he worked underground and during his time, he had supervised a lot of graduates that had come with mining degrees and he didn’t think they were treated fairly. So he discouraged me from doing mining engineering.
My basic question was, ‘to become general manager in the mines, what did I need to do?’ And the answer was simple; you were either a mining engineer or a metallurgist. Most general managers in the mines were mining engineers. But my dad said ‘no, you can’t do that’.
So I had to find another avenue for rising to level which I thought I needed to rise to. Metallurgy didn’t appeal to me so I tried to push for chemical engineering. But I was told that ZCCM had stopped sponsoring because the people they sponsored never stayed. They either never came back or didn’t stay with the mines.
Eventually, I settled for mechanical engineering. And in those days, it was a case where the best students were given a choice either to do mechanical or electrical engineering or computer science. The rest did metallurgy, mining or other engineering courses.
So I was given a scholarship to go to Southampton University in the UK to study mechanical engineering. When I got to England, everything was set for me, and another student, to go to Southampton University for mechanical engineering. The third student was going to do computer science.
But when we reached England, I revived the subject of actuarial sciences. When I spoke to the people that were in charge of student affairs in London, they didn’t know anything about my arrangement. But I said that was something I would like to do as opposed to mechanical engineering. I am more of a figures person; I am not mechanically minded.
But everybody said ZCCM had never sponsored anybody for actuarial science. They asked where they were going to utilise my skills, assuming they gave me the scholarship.
Luckily, one of the people there said ‘we had an inquiry from ZCCM trying to place some students before, meaning myself’. He said ‘although he has come for mechanical engineering, maybe we could ask the Institute of Actuaries’ – which is the professional body in the UK – ‘to get guidance on how we could go about this’. So we made contact with the institute and they said the best way was for me to go through university because in that way I could get some exemptions from the professional body.
As I said earlier, there were only two universities in England offering that course. So I was given a choice on where to go, if I was accepted.
My initial reaction was to go to a university in Scotland which was offering a longer programme. But everyone advised me to stick to City University in London. They said ‘this is a new profession altogether and if you go too far away from London, it may be a bit more difficult to supervise and provide the help that you may need’.
So contact was made with City University and I was invited for an interview. After about 10 to 15 minutes’ chat with the Professor, he just said, ‘your friends started last week and they are in that class. If you want to join them now, you are free to join’.
By that time, ZCCM had already paid Southampton University all the fees. So it became a bit tricky because Southampton refused, saying ‘we went out of our way to accommodate this student or the Zambian or African students’ because in a long time we were the only ones who opted to go to Southampton University. Everyone was going to Manchester, Imperial College and other places.
So it became a bit of a struggle between City and Southampton universities. City University said they will sort it out because as far as they were concerned I had chosen that programme and I could get started.
That is how I enrolled on that programme together with another Zambian colleague who was going to do computer science at Southampton University. We did that programme but unfortunately my friend didn’t get to the end. He cleared the first and second years but towards the end, there was a bit of a challenge for him and he had to be redirected.
But I finished the programme in 1990. After that, there was an opportunity for me to work and gain some practical experience there. I was given an opportunity to work with the same consultancy firm that ZCCM was engaging. They arranged for a work permit for me to work in England. In fact, even before I started working with them, ZCCM had been facilitating for me to work with the same company whilst at the university. So during my summer vacation when everybody else was coming back to Zambia, I would work in the city with them.
After I finished university, they gave me a job in Kent basically doing actuarial valuation for various companies. I worked with them for three years. The only sad bit was that when I was doing that, some people thought I had abandoned ZCCM so they wanted to punish me. And yet that shouldn’t have been the case because I had the blessings of ZCCM in terms of the work attachment.
As a result, one of my brothers who is in England now had a scholarship with ZCCM and it was suspended because they said ‘your brother is not coming back why should we send another person?’ Eventually, when everything was cleared, they gave him back his scholarship to do chemical engineering. And I have to mention Mr Max Sichula who was the then ZCCM director of human resources. He played a key role.
Q: When did you come back to Zambia?
A: I came back in February 1993 and joined ZCCM Group Insurance at Mutondo House. I worked with them briefly as management trainee. Shortly after that, I was moved over to Mukuba Pensions. At that time, everyone thought it was a wrong decision for me to go to university in the UK only to come and work for Mukuba Pensions. The concept of pensions was looked down upon. Mukuba wasn’t like one of those favourite employers. It was like a dumping ground. Although they were managing quite some significant assets, it wasn’t a very high profiled institution.
But I said ‘why should I stick to insurance when there is a bigger market in pensions?’ So I gladly accepted to move over to Mukuba Pensions and I took over a position as actuarial assistant.
Because they didn’t have any department as such, I had to set up the department and for a long time I was a one-man department. I initiated the investments for them and set up the IT infrastructure because there was nothing in terms of IT to write home about. I had to modernise the IT infrastructure. I got involved with a number of other major projects.
And it was easier now for the external consultants to interact with Mukuba because I had the skills and the link to the external consultants in the UK. It was easier because the external consultants had their own man on the ground who knew what to do.
This worked out very well. I learnt how the ZCCM machinery worked and all the protocols. But more importantly, I was involved with the modernisation of Mukuba Pensions in terms of bringing in new skills, new people, new graduates. Mukuba was not an area where fresh graduates thought they would go. Immediately I joined, Mukuba became like a good company to work for. So we attracted a lot of good skills.
I remained at Mukuba until 1997. In between, I got involved with a number of consultancies. About 1996, I got involved with the privatisation of Zambia State Insurance Corporation when Zambia Privatisation Agency advertised that. A number of institutions that were bidding for that got in touch with me to work with them and one of them was Cavmont.
If you recall, ZCCM was just about winding down at the time and the discussions about privatisation were hitting up.
The concern and worry was what was going to happen to institutions like Mukuba which relied on ZCCM in terms of IT infrastructure, everything was being done from ZCCM and was just passed on. We had to quickly move in. Although I was a relatively junior person, I had to head a team to provide the infrastructure that we needed to go forward.
We bought the soft and hard ware, we trained the people and we did the migration of all the important data so that at the time ZCCM was getting privatised, Mukuba was standing on its own. Even now, the systems that are in use are the systems that I left. They are still good enough. This was good enough for me. Imagine heading a project worth K400 million in 1995/96. It was a lot of money and the project was successful.
When I was at Mukuba, I found myself with a bit of too much time on my hand. So I got involved with lecturing in maths and statistics part time at Copperbelt University before they scraped the Zambia Diploma in Accountancy. There were also a lot of retrenchments going on that time in ZCCM so I had my own portfolio of clients who I was advising in terms of how to invest money after they received huge amounts of money as retrenchment packages.
About July 1997, I thought I had put in enough with Mukuba and I needed to move on. I was offered a very good job in Lusaka with Cavmont as general manager for Cavmont Securities. The money was good just as the challenge was, so I accepted the offer.
Q: How good was the money?
A: It was actually five times more than what I earned at Mukuba. I had trained as a stockbroker before but I never quite utilised my skills as a stockbroker though I was utilising the skills for my private portfolio. And I thought I needed to utilise those skills at a different level when I joined Cavmont.
So I resigned from Mukuba and joined Cavmont. The next two months were quite interesting because I had to get married so that as I moved up to Lusaka, the issues of marriage were out of the way.
Q: Did you have to quickly look for someone to marry or you had someone already?
A: She was already there. It’s just that I had been delaying a lot of decision-making in a lot of areas. You can imagine I was a bachelor for a long time. I had my own house here in Lusaka, then I had a good and big house in Kitwe and because I lived in a big house, everybody believed that I was married.
So I had to marry at that time in order to tie the loose ends and move on to the next level. That was all happening around 1997. I moved into Lusaka as my wife remained on the Copperbelt for a while.
When she joined me, we quickly settled down and we had a very ambitious programme. From the onset, we said to ourselves that my salary had gone up by that much but that did not mean that our expenditure should go up by the same margin. So our expenditure on consumption was very little, it didn’t go with the increase in my earnings.
Q: Is this because of your actuarial work?
A: I think it is a number of factors. Firstly, we made a decision that we were not going to rent a house in Lusaka. By that time we had a house in Nyumba Yanga in Lusaka which I bought when I was with Mukuba.
Within a year or two after moving into Lusaka, we needed to buy our own house. And that happened because we were able to save. Whatever we had, went towards savings and investments. We only had one son at the time. We said there were people with big families who earned a lot less than us and these people survived. So we said ‘why don’t we try to survive in the same manner that these people survive?’
We tried to fit in at that level and left everything else for investment. And over the years, we have been investing actively, especially in property. This is not my first house to buy (his house in Kabulonga). We bought a house in Nyumba Yanga, Avondale through overdrafts. Everyone else was using overdrafts for other things but I bought a house in Ibex Hill using overdraft. I put down a 50 per cent down payment in six months and completed the purchase of the house in another six months.
For us, buying property is something we started to enjoy. So we kept buying and upgrading. Sometimes we would buy and sell and reinvest that money. When we bought this property in Kabulonga, I was still at Cavmont and we bought from a workmate whose parents had died and they had been trying to dump the property on the market cheaply. I put down an initial deposit of K2 million, not because I was trying to take advantage of their desperation. We kept paying for it in bits and pieces for about one year. But the house was totally rundown. We have just developed it over the years.
Q: How many properties do you have, if you don’t mind answering that question?
A: We have got a farm in Chingola, this house and another house in Kitwe. The others I don’t consider to be serious. There will be a plot here and there. In between, we have bought and sold and upgraded a lot of properties; be it commercial, residential, they have come and gone.
When Barclays was selling, I bought two bank buildings through a mortgage arrangement which I later sold. One of them was an equity swap, property for equity. I actually own some stake in Pan African Building Society and I am chairman for Pan African Building Society. I gave them a building and they gave me shares in Pan African Building Society. This was an interesting transaction.
I sold the Nyumba Yanga house to upgrade to the Avondale house. I sold the Avondale house to upgrade to Ibex Hill house. I have looked for opportunities at every stage.
Q: For how long did you remain at Cavmont?
A: Cavmont was interesting. I was there for four years. As I said earlier, I joined as general manager Cavmont Securities which was basically on the stock broking side of things. Initially, I didn’t have practical stock broking experience but I was put through a very intensive quick programme on the operations of capital markets in Sweden under SIDA. They were very generous with information and exposure. When I came back, I was able to take on some reasonably big transactions. During my time, I was sponsoring broker for National Breweries.
At the time of ZCCM privatisation, when they wanted to move a primary listing from London to here, I was the sponsoring broker that was involved in introducing ZCCM shares to the Lusaka Stock Exchange. This gave me some good insight. Because of the privatisation of ZCCM at the time, I was the one reading through some of the papers, I was the one on the ground running with that.
During the time, Cavmont Securities was experiencing a lot of turn over in terms of personnel but I was able to provide a lot of stability. I was also able to provide profitability to the company. Before then, the profitability was a bit shaky but I was able to stabilise that side of things. I was also able to introduce the asset management unit.
During that time, I set up or managed large pension funds including the Bank of Zambia Pension Fund. I set up the Copperbelt Energy Company Pension Fund, I managed the Lonrho Group of Companies, Toyota, Lusaka Hotel, Kariba Minerals and many more.
In-house, I managed what was called the CGTC pension trust fund as well as some of the collective investment schemes. I basically started from scratch what you see today as Cavmont Insurance. I started it as an asset management unit which later became Kaleni Asset Management and ultimately hived off as a separate company.
For me, this gave me an opportunity to interract with large corporates and be able to provide advice to them, not just in terms of pension fund management but also looking at these institutions as investors in the capital market.
Q: For which institution did you leave Cavmont?
A: When I left Cavmont, I had actually wanted to retire. I had set out a goal to retire at the age of 35 and not 55. And I think I achieved that because by the time I was 35, I already had a wife and by the year 2000, I had closer to five properties and stable good income streams. I was set in terms of retirement but a lot of people thought I was still too young and there was a lot more that I could do.
But in my mind, I wanted to start running and managing my own businesses. I had a small hotel which I had bought from ZPA (Zambia Privatisation Agency) in Mpika. Again, I had picked up a small warehouse from ZPA at the time those things were going cheaply. When I was still at Cavmont, I was very solid in terms of financial base. I had enough properties and I didn’t need a job.
But then, interestingly, I had been contributing actively to the debate about NPF and its mismanagement at the time. So somebody threw a challenge at me saying, ‘NPF is transforming into NAPSA and you have been making so much noise in the background…’
I had been involved with the association of pension fund managers and at the time we were quite critical of the operations of NPF. I made a presentation at the time and somebody within the audience threw a challenge at me and said ‘if you can be so critical and you are providing solutions, why don’t you want to be part of the solution?’ I thought the challenge made sense.
When eventually they advertised for various positions, I applied. Although at the time I had a job as managing director for Kaleni Asset Management within the Cavmont group. I had two job titles; I was general manager on the security side and I was managing director on the asset management side.
So when NAPSA advertised for the position of director investments, I applied although a lot of people didn’t think it was such a wise move, especially that NPF was not doing well. But I said I needed to be part of tBut I said I needed to be part of the process. After the interviews, I got the job. Now came the part of negotiating the package. The package was much lower than what I was earning at Cavmont.
Q: I thought you decided to move to NAPSA for greener pasture considering that you left Mukuba for Cavmont which offered you five times more than you got at Mukuba…
A: No, the package was not as high.
Q: Out of interest, how much was the five times that you got at Cavmont?
A: It was good money, that’s all I can say. I could afford to do a number of things.
Q: So how much was the package at NAPSA?
A: It was less than half of what I had been earning at Cavmont. But I thought there was a good challenge for me to take head on. And I did.
Q: Did your wife approve your move, especially that your monthly income was to reduce?
A: Yes, she did. I consulted her and we went through the figures; you know she is an accountant by profession. Eventually, we agreed and she was very supportive because she thought I was meeting another challenge. I have always been driven by challenges. I took on the challenge so I could do something different for me and also for the nation.
I joined NAPSA as the first director of investments. There was no investments department so it was set up from scratch. This gave me the opportunity to build the team and set up the department, set up the systems and develop everybody around me.
When I was joining, the Fund was about K90 billion. At the time I was leaving six years later, it had grown to about K1.4 trillion. For me that was good because ‘this is me seeing from scratch’. I saw the Fund grow. About 90 per cent of it was all in property. So we had to re-align the portfolio from the property side to make the Fund a lot more liquid so that in case beneficiaries wanted to claim benefits, at least the monies would be there.
We also had to take the long-term view of the economy, especially in view of the fact that the liabilities of the Fund are long-term. We needed to start creating long-term assets and build a long-term portfolio. I was involved in that process.
But also to try and avoid pitfalls of NPF, we had to set up very stringent investment guidelines just to protect the Fund. Part of the problem from the previous system was that the Fund was not protected. People could invest anyhow with no proper guidance.
That we did very successfully and at least the monies are there. Anybody and everybody now can begin to benefit from that pool of resources, especially the economy as a whole because we are not talking about petty cash here. We are talking about the pension industry as a whole which has grown to about a billion dollars worth. People don’t see that but actually there is a billion dollars worth of pension fund, NAPSA accounting for half of that. The private pension schemes do account for quite a significant portion of it.
I have been involved with a number of other schemes. I was chairman for Zambia State Insurance Corporation Pension Trust Fund from 2002 to 2004, so I know how the industry has been growing. I was, and I am still involved with Mukuba Pension Scheme. I am still chairman for the Barclays Pension Trust Fund. I was involved with NAPSA until last year when I left for Workers Compensation Fund in Ndola.
Yes, I have been involved with a number of these large pension funds and I have seen the benefits that can accrue to the economy through proper management of these pension funds, especially on the savings mobilisation that come through that
Q: Why did you leave NAPSA?
A: I went to Workers Compensation Fund in December 2006. I didn’t leave NAPSA as in resigning or contract coming to an end. I was asked to go and help out on secondment because of the challenges and difficulties that the company was having.
Q: Who asked you to help out at Workers Fund?
A: The board at Workers Compensation Fund had suspended the commissioner who was there, the deputy commissioner and the financial controller. So they needed somebody who could fit the three positions as financial controller, chief executive and everything else. They approached me asking me to help them sort out that problem and that the job was in Ndola.
I was told like today and I was expected to be in Ndola the following day because the problem was urgent. I responded positively and I got to Ndola. Whilst there, that is when I discovered a lot of things; the nature of the problems and what needed to be done. It’s been another chapter of challenges.
Q: Is the position of commissioner an equivalent of managing director?
A: Commissioner is a chief executive position. It’s been quite interesting in that Workers Compensation Fund was or still is at the level of where NPF was, facing the same kind of challenges and problems.
Q: What are these challenges and problems?
A: Some of the problems that NPF had, had to do basically with investments. They didn’t have proper guidelines. Secondly, there was a problem of personnel. You can’t run an effective institution without the right personnel. You need to have people that have got the right skills. You are talking about a billion-dollar industry. Look at NAPSA, I went there when we had about K90 billion but now there is something like K1.4 trillion. With that kind of money, you need people with the right skills; be it accounting skills, IT skills or management skills.
The team that was on the ground at want to make sure that there is comfort on the part of the employers who are contributing the money, you have to ensure that there is comfort on the part of the beneficiaries themselves because we are not doing this as ourselves, as employees.
There maybe several stakeholders in this but the ultimate are the beneficiaries. So we have to ensure that they receive benefits without hassles. These are the things we are trying to address or redress very quickly.
Q: So what is Workers Compensation Fund Control Board about?
A: It is a social security institution with a primary responsibility of providing cover for employees that maybe faced with accidents or occupational diseases. Occupational diseases refer to work-related diseases. So we provide benefits to employees that get injured in the course of their work.
In the case of death, we also provide benefits to the surviving children. We go further and provide rehabilitation. If, for example, someone was involved in an accident and we need to get them back on track, we actually help rehabilitate them to ensure that they are able to take on another job.
If they can’t take on another job, we provide ongoing support be it by way of, not just the pension, but sometimes we allow them to commute that pension for a lamp sum which can help them start some business or things like that. We provide a lot of training, especially in as far as occupational health and safety is concerned. We have a full-fledged unit for this which is based in Kitwe.
Let me give you an example, assuming an employee gets injured some of the things that people do not realise we do, for example you get people that are injured and are not able to work; in the interim we actually come in to provide cushion to employers in terms of providing benefits to the employees for the time that they are not at work. We provide cushion in terms of continuation of earnings. But as far as the employers are also concerned, we do pick up hospital bills. For as long as the employer has reported an accident to us and the accident is work-related, we give support and pick up hospital bills.
But sadly, a number of employers do not want to report these accidents just because they have not been complying by way of making contributions to the Fund. So they are missing out the benefits that should be accruing to them. For as long as they are reporting, every employee has got the right to compensation. For us, when an accident happens, we don’t ask questions like ‘are you compliant?’ Those come later. The immediate is ‘what is it that this employee who has suffered an accident needs?’ And we provide the necessary guidance and compensation at the time. The issues of compliance come later.
Q: I think you have not lived very long but it appears to me that you have achieved a lot of things in your 42 years on earth so far, there are so many lessons one can learn from both your personal and professional lives…
A: I am 42 and I don’t consider myself young. I wanted to retire at 35. In the corporate side, I have been involved with a lot of things. I have sat on a lot of boards and I have learnt a lot of things. I still sit on the registration committee of Securities and Exchange Commission, I still sit on the board of Coppernet. I helped the team buy the company from the mines when I was still at Cavmont and I have been a director since. I am still involved with Barclays, Pan African Building Society and I am the chairman for the Association of Pension Fund Managers.
I do a lot of other things in my private life. Having been a beneficiary of the scholarships that ZCCM gave at Mpelembe, I am actually the president of Mpelembe Ex-Students Association. We identify students whose parents might not have financial capacity to sponsor them to a school like Mpelembe.
So we pick the top 20 or 40 students in Zambia from financially disadvantaged families and provide them with full scholarships. We have got two students right now at Mpelembe who we have paid for, from grade 10, 11 and 12.
Most of the ex-Mpelembe students who are all over the world chip in on a yearly basis to raise enough funds to sponsor a deserving child. The child has to be intelligent, an excellent performer. We are not looking for Mr Average.
So far we have sponsored one from Nakambala School and another from Matero Boys. We are not looking at schools like Lake Road or Nkwazi. So we do take the trouble of going to interview these people. The ones we have picked are doing very well and we are planning to sponsor another one this year.
Q: In conclusion, could you talk about your wife and children?
A: My wonderful wife Priscilla is an accountant. She helps me in a lot of things. She has been involved in teaching finance and administration. She is a former executive director for ZARD (Zambia Association for Research and Development). She quit her job so that we could be together in Ndola because this business of moving up and down doesn’t help.
Right now, she is running our farm in Chingola and at the same time taking up some NGO-type consultancies. We have four of our own children, two boys and two girls. The first-born Kabwe is 10 turning 11, Kalikeni is the second born. He is seven turning eight. The third born is Mweo, Mweo as in life. Don’t ask me where that name comes from. I just wanted to appreciate life. So she is named Mweo just as an appreciation of life. She is four turning five. The other girl, our last one, is Mupaka. She is three turning four.
Over the years, we have kept a number of nieces and nephews. As I mentioned earlier, my sister died sometime back and two of her children have basically grown up with us. One of my brother’s kids has also been with us.
Dad died two years ago here in this house. He suffered a stroke and I went and fetched him from the village. But he died whilst with us here. Mum is still alive in Kawambwa.
My brothers are all in the UK, one sister is in Germany. I have been trying to encourage everybody to come back and be part of the developmental process in Zambia. There is a lot more that needs to be done progressively within the country.
Q: Anything you would like to say, finally?
A: I would like to thank you more sincerely for giving me this opportunity. I think there is a lot more than needs to be done out there. In terms of my career and the path that I have taken, what people don’t realise is that in certain countries, social security can either win you or lose you an election. It’s one area that is under played but really, social security is about people’s lives. We need to do a lot more to strength issues of social security in the country. There is a lot of financial impact that results from the mobilisation of resources that come to social security.
In Zambia alone, we are looking at a one billion dollar industry. This is not petty cash. You can do a lot of things with this kind of money in terms of improving people’s lives and general welfare.
We just need to strengthen these institutions and improve on the coverage. There are a lot of people who are not covered by social security, people in the informal sector and some of the people that might be covered but with inadequate benefits.
On the legislative side, we need to build structures that strengthens that side of things. Ultimately, that needs to filter through into the economy for the benefit of every Zambian.
Q: Thank you so much, also, for the opportunity. Certainly, I have learnt a lot from this interview. Some of the lessons I will apply at personal and professional levels. I just hope our readers will find this interview useful at personal, family and professional levels.
A: Oh, that will be good!
Labels: ACTUARIAL, CHARLES MPUNDU, ECONOMETRY, PROFILE
posted by MrK @ 2:51 PM
9 Comments:
A great African story worth sharing...Thanks Charles. You certainly have inspired me.
OJ. in Johannesburg.
Good Profile
May God continue using you mightly as a vessel towards us upcomings Mr Mpundu.
Wonderful, I always read this profile over and aver again and still get inspired😊🤩
I'm so much inspired by you (Mr Mpundu). God bless you.
Inspiring profile
How can I reach you Mr Mpundu
Nice profile, how can I get access to you
Wonderful Dr Mpundu Charles. This is good profile. God bless your wife, children and you.
I also long to do actuarial science at the university of Zambia (UNZA).
You've really inspired me a lot. Thanks to the great reporter Amos
So inspiring, it definitely is worth it to take risks and challenge yourself. Am a student at the copperbelt university currently studying Bsc in pure mathematics and many people wonder what jobs are available for pure mathematicians. Honestly speaking i wondered too. Having people in our society like Mr Charles Mpunde broadens our young and conservative minds when it comes to career choices.Thank you very much Sir.
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