AMINUIS Constituency has in the past been in the news for varied reasons. Some negative, that is if you would like to see people asserting their rights as negative, and some positive.
In the past Aminuis was seen as a traditional-cum-political fortress of some kind of a certain political-cum-traditional leaning, if not an archaic land of traditional mobsters, a fact that made it the envy even to its rivals.
In fact, the constituency many a times has been besieged because of its uncompromising stance and intractability as an area with the inhabitants resisting with all ammunition at their disposal, and with all the vigour and courage that they could master, to be trampled upon for the hollow and sometimes meaningless dictum of progress and development.
As a result the constituency was seemingly at war with the rest of the country, if not with itself As a corollary development in the constituency ground to a halt, if it has not grounded to a complete halt, with the two rival development committees or foundations, as you may wish to refer to them, or as they have been calling themselves, seeming to have been at cross-purposes.
What eventually happened to the two to this day is anybody’s guess.
But this week some good news has been coming from the constituency, and particularly from the village of Revia where villagers, consonant with the constituency councillor, Ervin Uanguta, and the chairperson of the Omaheke Commnunal Land Board, Kaveri Kavari, presided over the dismantling of some illegal fences. It is a good sign that the constituency of Aminuis that in the past has been seen as the nemesis of progress and development, is this time around providing a lead in this regard.
Actually the village of Revia is only the beginning. Because illegal fencing does not start start and end with it. Indeed illegal fencing has mushroomed in the whole constituency so much so that there is hardly a space left that can be called a communal area in this constituency.
The area, as any other communal area, has so to speak become a free for all pockets of well-to-do private landlords who have fenced off large tracts of land, squeezing in the process those farmers unable to grab land in this way by also fencing their own plots.
So it may come as a reliefe, especially to the weak and poor farmers that the authorities and villagers are acting consequent on this vexed issue, which has rendered many a struggling farmer disparate and hopeless in terms of their only means of livelihood, which is subsistence farming.
While communal land has been and is defined as State land, held in trust in this regard by especially traditional authorities for the benefit of all people inhabiting such areas, such areas have been rendered private properties by many illegal fences which have been spreading all over many of our communal areas to the extent that the concept of State land in the areas have been rendered a misnomer. Not only this but many a communal farmer have, as a result, been confined to corridors.
Now that the village of Revia seems to be paving the way in this regard, in terms of addressing the problems of illegal fencing, this must not stop at this village but must spread to the whole of the Aminuis Constituency, and beyond, to the whole country because this is a problem endemic to the whole country, especially in the communal areas where a majority, if not most and all of our people are trying to eke out a living under difficult circumstances, which includes unreliable pastures due to sporadic rains, scarce water sources, which in turn are compounded by illegal fencing.
What is good for the goose must be good for the gander, and it would make no sense that the village of Revia is embarking on this exemplary and commendable action to give effect to the government’s policy against illegal fencing if the government itself, and its agents, do not act consequently to enforce this policy to all intents and purposes. As much the enforcement of the policy against illegal fencing cannot solve the problem by itself.
The matter must be approached holistically. And this means addressing the land hunger which is chronic in Namibia. Because what is driving people to fence off tracts of land in communal areas is nothing else but lack of farming land. To say lack of farming land is even putting it mildly, because the majority of people in the communal areas, frankly, do not have farming land that they can speak about. Most of these areas, as is common knowledge, have been eroded so much so that they have lost productivity.
In fact, those farming in these areas, one wonders how they have been able to contribute to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country to the extent they have been, given their farming predicaments?
Yes, dismantling such fences may offer hope to those who in this process have been squeezed – but can we really rely upon it to solve the problem of land hunger, or use it as a substitute for such?
Likewise, in terms of a holistic approach to this problem, these efforts should equally go parallel with other efforts towards uplifting the rural areas in terms of development, so that inhabitants of these areas find or have a diversified means of livelihood other than subsistence farming, a productive process that seems to demand massive land, but which seems to be, at least currently and until a different political approach is adopted, an infinite and scarce resource. In view of the fact, especially, that the willing seller, willing buyer, axiomatically saying, has proven ineffective if not workable at all!
Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro