Rudolf Gaiseb
Landless People’s Movement (LPM) parliamentarian Utaara Mootu says land restoration should be approached as a political and social imperative rather than a purely technical exercise.
She was speaking at the Global Changemaker Academy for Parliamentarians (G-CAP) in Bonn, Germany, held from 25-29 August, where she underscored the need for ecosystem management that is human-centred and guided by lawmaking which addresses the root causes of land degradation.
Mootu argued that legislation must place communities ahead of gross domestic product considerations, while safeguarding the rights, responsibilities and safety of those who live on and depend on the land.
“When trees are debated, so are control, profit, and whose children breathe the cleaner air. We refuse the reassuring yet hollow technocratic script that insists green recovery is just a question of better tools. Instead, we speak of justice, tenure security, and of commons that once belonged to the people being returned to their rightful care and management,” Mootu told the meeting.
For Namibia, she advocated community-led resource management, stronger recognition of customary land tenure, and an end to what she described as the “ever-repeated story” of dispossession. Crucially, she said such interventions must be communicated in languages understood by affected communities.
“Every kilometre of reforested land must be defended by statutes that mirror the daily realities of those who plant and guard the seedlings in the early light of dawn,” she added.
In 2023 Namibia launched the GEF-7 Dryland Sustainable Landscape Impact Programme, known as the Namibia Child Project, to curb land degradation in the Mopane-Miombo belt of the north. The initiative, worth more than US$6.1 million, is part of a Global Environment Facility (GEF) drive and is implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in partnership with the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism and the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform.
At the launch, then environment minister Pohamba Shifeta warned that Namibia’s Miombo-Mopane Woodland Ecoregion, spanning the Okavango and Kunene basins, faced extensive degradation due to deforestation, unsustainable practices, poverty and climate change.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, communities have also lamented being displaced under conservation models that, under the guise of protecting land and wildlife, strip people of ancestral lands and livelihoods. Mootu criticised such “fortress conservation” models, which she said criminalise rural knowledge systems and turn living lands into militarised zones.
“The question is: who gets to re-green the planet, and by whose script, ledger of obligation?” she asked, adding that no legislation is neutral — it either perpetuates “green injustice” or dismantles it.
The parliamentarian further highlighted that women and youth disproportionately bear the brunt of ecological collapse.
“The burden of a collapsing biosphere is logged first onto the backs of rural and urban women and youth, even as our voices and our sovereign autonomy over seeds, forests and governance remain excluded from boardrooms and budgets,” she said.