Recently the Ministry of Land Reform announced the holding of the second land conference. Certainly there can be no question as to whether such a conference is necessary or not. In fact, this must be something the whole country has been waiting for, and thus consensually agreed to its necessity. Not only is such a conference necessary but long overdue.
More crucial, 26 years after the first land conference, is the agenda of such a conference. Land reform and redistribution, needless to say being a vexed question still, 26 years after independence and the first land conference, and 22 years after the churches’ land conference, and greatly remaining as such, there should be no doubt what such a conference must and should address. There are people who in this country have lost land. Or to be exact have lost their inheritances. Such inheritances for some, are nothing but the very land which is the subject of the envisaged conference. Not land for its own sake as their inheritance but for the very fact that today such have been passed on to fellows, and even in an independent Namibia is being passed on to others but not them.
Yes, granted! Today what should have been the inheritance of some indigenous Namibians is today an inheritance of fellow Namibians, bequeathed them by their forebears, as much as they have stolen such land. But the means by which their forebears got such properties, which they eventually bequeathed them, has never been disputed for what it was and had been, outright robbery. Thus the vexed question remains if the rightful owners of such tracts of land cannot reclaim such in one way or another, apparently as they are today the properties of others, notwithstanding how they have acquired them, then what recourse do the legitimate and rightful owners of such tracts of land have? This is the question that the land conference must once and for all answer.
Because for long the question of ancestral land has been shelved. Shelved out of respect for the country’s supreme law, the Constitution, which among others, respects propertied rights. But the question remains whether those whose property rights were violated by colonial dispensations, by any means have any means to any recourse whatsoever, even if such should entail and exclude no return to their ancestral land?
Not necessarily, because restitution does not necessarily mean and entail a return and reclaiming of ancestral land. But surely it must recognise that there are those who during the colonial era lost their properties, the properties that today the country and her laws very much protect despite well conscious that they are stolen properties. While there must very much be respect for modern-day property laws, as much there must be a recognition not only from whom such properties were confiscated, but also the circumstances under which such a confiscation took place. Not only this but there must also be a recognition of the essence of the anti-colonial resistance, as well as the liberation struggle. Often there’s a perception that the colonial resistance, and subsequently the liberation struggle, were essentially for political rights, and not for economic rights. Such a notion is completely misunderstood if not misguided. Because political rights cannot be intrinsic in themselves but a means towards an end, such an end being economic rights.
There can be no denial that land in pre-colonial times was essential to the economic existentialism of our forebears. Not only, this but land acquisition was central to settler colonialists’ occupation of Namibia. Hence the reality we see today in Namibia where vast tracts of land are occupied by former colonisers, some of whom today are, thanks to the policy of national reconciliation, fellow Namibian citizens. Hence, remaining on stolen property unhindered, unconcerned, unconscientious, amoral and self-righteous to the basis of their ownership, which is an inheritance of stolen properties, today camouflaged as legally acquired properties in the parlance of property rights as enshrined and protected by the Namibian Constitution, and its attendant property laws.
Vast tracts of land are to this day still the property of foreign landlords. Certainly in the face of the reality of those whose forebears have been dispossessed of the land in question, remaining landless, this is an unacceptable and untenable situation. And this is what the second land conference surely must address, once and for all. Not at the expense of those who in the post-colonial parlance of national reconciliation may be considered rightful owners, but equally not to the detriment of the descendants of the rightful original owners from whom such lands were confiscated to the benefit of colonial settlers.
It is not accidental, nor incidental, and not even a fashionable matter that currently the Nama and Ovaherero have been consequent and unwaveringly at the forefront of the genocide and reparations movement. Because there is no way one can delink the landless from the historical epoch of genocide, and subsequently the anti-colonial resistance. As much there is no way any address of the land question should and must lose sight of the historicity of the land that propelled the genocide. Given this importance of the land question, that is why one, and especially the government, must have full understanding of the groundswell view that proper preparation must precede the said conference, including a well-crafted agenda, going to the core of the land question, and ensuring that those who matter, those who have lost their ancestral land, have enough time and space to express themselves on this matter at the very envisaged conference.