Namibians will be going to the polls within the next two weeks.
The print and other media have provided the general public with party political information on various sectors of the Namibian society and economy.
Within this context, New Era published the political manifestos on land reform of five political parties, including the ruling SWAPO Party at the end of October.
Acknowledging the fact that newspapers only provide summaries, it is still very disappointing to see that opposition parties in particular have very little to offer on how to improve our land reform programme, despite persistent criticism of its implementation. There is a consensus across the party political divide that land redistribution is too slow.
All parties promised an accelerated land acquisition programme with SWAPO Party and the Republican Party explicitly committing themselves to the willing-buyer willing-seller principle, while NUDO, SWANU and EEF propagating mixtures of land nationalisation and the restitution of ancestral land.
As was to be expected, only those political parties that historically enjoyed strong support among communities that were dispossessed by the German colonial regime, included the restitution of ancestral land rights in their programmes.
Increasing the pace of land redistribution is indeed a challenge, and not only because the previously disadvantaged communities demand this.
In terms of official land distribution targets, the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement (MLR) needs to acquire and redistribute 2.7 million hectares over the next seven years to 2020 to meet the official target of 5 million hectares by 2020. That this is indeed very ambitious becomes clear when we remind ourselves that the MLR acquired only 2.3 million ha from 1990 to the end of the 2012/2013 financial year.
This figure includes 54 farms amounting to 411 257 hectares, which were transferred from the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Rural Development to the MLR in the 1990s. Given our record of land acquisition, it is reasonable to expect political parties to tell the public how they would accelerate the pace of land acquisition, particularly within the willing-seller willing buyer paradigm, and how to fund it.
Apart from the need to speed up land redistribution, many other questions relating to land redistribution and resettlement need political and practical answers. Take the equity issue in providing access to agricultural land. Currently, all previously disadvantaged Namibians, regardless of off-farm incomes, can apply for resettlement. Efforts by the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement to introduce selection criteria that would disqualify Namibians earning more than N$200 000 per annum from being considered for resettlement came to nothing when a workshop with regional governors rejected this proposal in early 2011.
There are certainly arguments for and against removing income criteria from the selection process, as there are pros and because of accommodating part-time farmers. These need to be debated thoroughly. Regrettably, none of our political parties appear to have anything to say about this.
Demands from low-income urban households to be provided with serviced land and adequate housing also raise uncomfortable questions about equity, when the cost of resettlement is considered. During the 2013-2014 financial year, the MLR spent N$142 million on land acquisition, paying on average N$1 402 per hectare, or an astonishing N$1 945 205 for each of the 73 beneficiary households that were settled on that land.
This cost excludes the costs of administering and implementing the acquisition of land such as the farm assessments and valuation, planning, advertising and beneficiary selection.
It also excludes any post-settlement support, which, according to international experience, should be at least two thirds of the investment costs in land acquisition.
If we translate the cost of settling one beneficiary household into the urban context, the financial resources required to settle one household on agricultural land would pay for 13 Type D1 houses of 32m2 at a reported cost of N$150.912 per house built through the mass housing programme. By contrast, the Shack Dwellers Federation would build approximately 60 houses of the same size, using community labour and resources.
This is not to suggest that land redistribution should not be accelerated. But the glaring inequalities in resources mobilised for rural and urban land reform, respectively, require political debate and put the onus on political parties to offer some leadership. The question is not whether money is available to implement land reforms in either rural or urban or both sectors. Money is available, even though perhaps not abundantly. The issue is how we chose to spend it. And that is an eminently political decision, which political parties ought to engage and enlighten the electorate about.
An issue that is almost completely lost in the general concerns with numbers of farms acquired and households settled is that we are only progressing very slowly with the registration of long-term lease agreements over resettlement land, as provided for in the relevant legislation.
This is in stark contrast to the relatively large amounts of human and financial resources that are spent on improving tenure security in communal areas. Registered long-term leaseholds are necessary to constitute beneficiaries, as economic subjects who can act independently of the state (subject to their lease conditions). Moreover, registered leasehold will enable those who need and are able to service a loan, to offer their lease agreement as security. This is not to suggest that registered leasehold – and freehold title for that matter – on its own will lead to an increase the uptake of credit, but it is a necessary condition for doing so.
And finally, the role that land redistribution is expected to play in poverty reduction remains unclear. A sober look at our experiences over the last 25 years suggests that access to land may not be the most efficient way to reduce poverty. Farming requires a minimum asset base that normally exceeds what poor people have. The MLR certainly seems to have questioned the wisdom of this assumption. In its revised resettlement criteria it emphasises that to be previously disadvantaged is not enough to qualify for resettlement, beneficiaries should be previously disadvantaged and able to farm. This assessment led the MLR to propose two basic models for resettlement: the Economic Development Model and the Social Welfare Model. This is a significant departure from our original policy statements but is not likely to meet general approval. The onus is on those who disagree with this assessment to enlighten the general public on how they propose to make land reform for the poor work in their favour.
After 25 years of experience with resettlement, the country has accumulated sufficient practical experience to improve the overall performance of land acquisition and resettlement. Few political parties appear to have used that experience to their and the country’s advantage. Perhaps the policy lessons to be drawn from all this experience should be evaluated against the observations of the Prime Minister in April this year, when he was reported to have said that the only way that Namibia can achieve more generalised prosperity and a more equitable distribution of land was by decreasing our dependency on agriculture in favour of a more diversified economy, more specifically manufacturing and services industries.
By Wolfgang Werner
*Dr Wolfgang Werner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Land and Property Sciences of the Polytechnic of Namibia. The views expressed in this opinion piece are his own and do not reflect those of the Polytechnic of Namibia.