NAMIBIA’s war against colonial-apartheid occupation was indeed the war for land, which was the cause of racial exclusivity and inequality. Obviously, landlessness cannot be divorced from structured abject poverty, starvation, lack of education, alcohol and drug abuse, rape, overall crime and eventual unrest. Hopelessness leads to carelessness and hyper-frustration. Landlessness, poverty and all structures in place to keep the majority of any population rootless and marginalised, are a crime against humanity. It would finally have to be outlawed by governments and regional, continental and global organisations, including SADC, Ecowas, the AU and the UN. Time has indeed run out.
Unanimously, governments and organisations already in place should structure laws to effect a legal and legitimate transfer of land. Such responsible action taken would stabilise not only Namibia and all African countries exposed to historically organised crime through alien colonial, apartheid and UDI laws, protecting hostile and exclusive oligopolies and their ill-gotten land in Namibia and Africa as a whole. Namibia’s Founding President, Sam Nujoma, has repeatedly warned against stagnating the land issue. Nujoma criticised a certain privileged section of Namibia’s society for ignoring the hand of reconciliation, by refusing to assist integrating their fellow indigenous African Namibians into the economy at large, including the land.
After all, the former colonial-apartheid owners of the land simply stole the land from the original owners. When the indigenous population resisted, they were shot and driven off the land. That act of crime is a historic fact. If not addressed, the nation will never be allowed to grow, nor will it be at peace.
President Hifikepunye Pohamba too warned against the landlessness of the original African Namibian majority, when he pointed out that “today you own the land (referring to the current owners of land). Tomorrow, the frustrated landless will take back their land and you find yourself without land.” On April 06, 2000, Zimbabwe’s fast track land reform began. On that day in the history of Britain’s former colony, the long frustrated war veterans took charge and forcibly seized most of white-owned farmland. At that time, Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, was on a state visit in Cuba. The war veterans took him and his ZANU-PF led government by surprise. In fact, Mugabe and his government stood accused of “dragging their feet in the transfer of land back to the original Zimbabwean owners.”
It was to be expected that the international West led by the US and UK, would try to stop Zimbabwe’s land re-possession, using whatever they had in their war cabinets to do so. However, they actually knew that if a country was suffering serious poverty and subsequently no growth, land ownership would have to be addressed. Here are some examples of how the US dealt with landlessness immediately after World War 2. Between 1945 and 1949, Washington under General Douglas MacArthur administered Japan as if it were its own. An army of American administrators was deployed. Their main aim was to redistribute the land. It eventually paved the way for Japan’s meteoric economic growth over the decades since then.
As soon as Japan and its land were securely administered, the American state transferred General MacArthur to the Chinese island of Taiwan. As was the case with Japan, General MacArthur redistributed the land to its original, indigenous owners. That move became the foundation for Taiwan’s economic miracle of the last 65 years. But, when Zimbabwe followed the same route as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China, the US regime led the international West in its hostile attack on Zimbabwe. You might ask yourselves, why that? The answer is simple – the land headed by a president of mixed race would not tolerate land taken from whites.
Despite the international Western acts of brutal racism against Zimbabwe, the country’s land reform is a success. Namibia and South Africa are no exception. Democracy and independence from colonial-apartheid oppression did not bring with it economic redress. The indigenous African majority remains poor and economically marginalised, while the former beneficiaries retain the benefits they are used to.
In fact, they too profited from the change into independence. It would work against Namibia’s constitution to simply seize land from those who stole it in the first place. However, this could become ever harder to maintain. When the country’s Minister of Lands and Resettlement, Alpheus !Naruseb, explained why the government had rejected 259 resettlement farms, certain media attacked the minister, as expected. His reasoning, however, is that “the ministry aims to have farms in a proper working condition to ensure that beneficiaries are not left stranded and unable to farm as soon as they take up their units.”
Such responsible approach to Namibia’s land transfer would ensure that government would not walk into an open trap and be discredited. By avoiding such undermining traps, government acts responsibly within the constitution and the law of the land. Namibia too, like South Africa, has little time to address the land issue, if it wants to assure food security and counter the evil crime of structured abject poverty of the masses. The same owners and their advisors that developed structured poverty, would turn against the government by fomenting a highly treasonous “North African-style Arab Spring” to ensure regime change in order to create an “economic dustbowl”. The late British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was famous for her strong stance, which she lived by the maxim – “Don’t just talk, do!”
• Udo Froese is a non-institutionalised, independent political and socio-economic analyst and columnist, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
My Twitter Handle: @theotherafrika
Follow My Blog: theotherafrika.wordpress.com
By Udo W. Froese