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Since independence in 1990, landless Namibians have occupied white-owned farms and each time the government has evicted them. About 1,000 of them staged yet another occupation on Sunday. They are angry that their government is slow in redistributing land, so decided to take the law into their own hands.The land question in Namibia is reflective of the situation in Zimbabwe prior to the fast track land reform and redistribution programme of 2000 and the prevailing situation in South Africa. Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa inherited racially skewed land ownership structures when they attained their freedom. Zimbabwe has addressed hers, first through a market based, willing-buyer-willing-seller approach from 1980 to 1999, which was discarded for its slowness. The revolutionary style was taken in February 2000, with great success.
South Africa is experimenting with the market-based method, with little success. Namibia is using the willing-buyer-willing-seller system too and the results have been the same, slow and frustrating. In both countries, authorities acknowledge the criticality of land redistribution, but want to execute it in a conciliatory manner, fearful of angering the white land owners and the white establishment across the globe.
We cannot prescribe how sovereign peoples must address their challenges, particularly emotive ones like land ownership but we implore them most strongly to respect the majority of their people, not a racial elite that took ownership of the land through theft and military might.
We urge the Namibia government to show that it is, in word and deed, with the masses from whom it derives its mandate, by speedily allocating them the land they desperately need. The land is theirs anyway. By delaying in prosecuting the programme, the government would be justifiably accused of respecting the undeserved land rights of a minority over those of the majority.
We don’t understand how and why a government that draws its support from the land-hungry masses and that prior to every election, promises to give them the resource, proceeds to act in a manner that defeats the same campaign message by keeping the white farmers on the land. While apartheid South Africa and the Germans before them resorted to strong-arm tactics and unjust laws to seize and keep the land, now it is a black government perpetuating the injustice.
“We feel the issue of land has been dragging for a long time,” Job Amupanda, leader of the Affirmative Repositioning group and spokesperson of the ruling Swapo Youth League told our Harare Bureau on Monday. “Namibians can’t continue living like squatters in their own country.”
Their dispossession started with German occupation in 1884 and continued when apartheid South Africa assumed the administration of Namibia after the Second World War in 1945. Then, people inhabiting the central Namibian plateau, principally the Herero, Nama, Damara and San, were forcefully evicted to make way for colonial settlers.
Like Zimbabweans, Namibians took up arms against the invaders. Students of history cannot forget about the Nama-Herero wars of 1904-07 during which the Germans perpetrated what is widely recorded as the first genocide in the history of mankind. Up to 150,000 Nama and Herero people perished, a majority of them of hunger and thirst after the Germans systematically denied them food and poisoned their water wells.
So with the onset of independence, the land question ranked high on the political agenda. In 1990, around 45 percent of the total land area and 74 percent of the potentially arable land was owned by less than 4,100 people, mainly white commercial farmers who comprised less than 0.2 percent of the total population.
In its 1989 election manifesto, Swapo committed itself to “transfer some of the land from the few with too much of it to the landless majority.”
Not much has been achieved.
In an opinion article on Friday headlined “Land: Are we finally getting there?” the influential daily New Era said: “Our current land reform policy has done nothing than maintain the status quo of minority ownership dominance as well as advancing the individualistic interests of emerging black elites at the expense of mostly young Namibian professionals and the rural poor.”
The assessment is justifiable.
However, the new President Hage Geingob has been talking tough about the need for land reform and has taken measures to give it more impetus. He has threatened to invoke the constitution by triggering the expropriation clause and warned that the government would acquire land from absentee landlords. He set up a ministry of land reform and established a Cabinet committee on land.
In addition, his government has ordered all local authorities to provide details of available land and halted the auctioning of public land, which has often seen only the rich buying it.
All this is encouraging, but what Namibians want now is to be allocated land.
Online Reporter