Windhoek
Government has withdrawn its High Court application to get an urgent interdict against the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) group and its three founding members to prevent them from carrying out their planned land occupation on July 31.
The urgent application was filed on Friday while an AR delegation was meeting President Hage Geingob at State House to resolve the standoff between the activists and the government.
Eventually the parties reached common ground on how to address the housing problem in the country, a move said to be the primary reason behind government’s decision to withdraw the court application with immediate effect.
If an agreement was not reached last Friday, the court process would have continued and would have possibly resulted in AR being ordered by the court to shelve their plans to grab land.
Job Amupanda is listed as the first respondent, followed by George Kambala, Dimbulukeni Nauyoma and the Affirmative Repositioning movement. Acting Judge Collins Parker struck the matter from the court roll on Tuesday morning.
The AR leaders had announced on Sunday that they were backing away from the planned land grab scheduled for Friday. “Take notice that the applicant hereby withdraws the Notice of Motion (Urgent Application) dated 24 July 2015.” the government said in papers submitted to court this week.
The two parties came up with seven resolutions after the six-hour closed-door meeting at State House on Friday, with the most notable being that of servicing 200,000 plots countrywide in order to address the housing backlog, currently estimated to be over 110,000.
Government will start by servicing identified land in Windhoek, Walvis Bay and Oshakati on a pilot project basis. It was also resolved that the period between 29 July to 5 August 2015, will be dedicated to a nationwide clearance of identified urban land.