Charles Tjatindi
It is high time the government revisit its resettlement programme, which is yet to fully emancipate landless people. The programme has done little to turn former landless people into fully fledged commercial farmers.
While we are dealing with the elephant in the room, which is the larger policy on land reform in general, we cannot omit to devise strategies on how we could effectively nip the resettlement programme in the bud.
There are several scenarios to blame for the shortages in delivery of the programme, but many reasons for its slow pace has to do with the way it is packaged. To start with, the programme is premised against the resettling of any Namibian farmer. Fair enough, but how does resettling someone who has not shown any form of farming acumen on communal land benefit that farmer?
If we use the programme for farmers who are still in their trial-and-error phase of farming, we would be missing the goal by far. The programme can simply not be a training ground. It has to produce farmers that would feed themselves and the rest of the country. Farmers that would be leading from the front; not those that will be expecting hand-outs at every opportunity.
The illegal subletting of farms by those resettled to the well-off and well connected has been another sore thumb sticking out. Who do we blame for this? The farmers? I beg to differ; the system is to blame here. If you resettle a farmer on several thousand hectares of land that he cannot fill with his 10 goats and five cattle, what do you expect?
Post-settlement support is crucial as beneficiaries often lack assets, skills and cash. This too is something that is yet to produce good results. Part-time farmers and beneficiaries who had a job in towns and could use their insurance policies as collateral to obtain loans for farming, had an obvious advantage against beneficiaries who had no regular income.
Currently, the programme is too slow and does not yield the desired outcome of agricultural productivity. Instead, the programme is a burden to those who have been allocated farms as they are not receiving the necessary support to farm effectively.
The fundamental question is; how do we ensure that the intended benefits of the initiative trickle down to those at grassroots level? How do we make sure farmers in great danger of drought, predators and poisonous plants are given first priority when it comes to resettlement? Discerning this here would be the difference between life and death for many of these farmers.
Many needy farmers have been applying to be resettled, but keep being rejected.
According to them, the programme allegedly only benefits wealthy “well connected” farmers who may afford to “by-pass the system”, as poor farmers find it hard to be shortlisted for available farming land under the programme. Can one blame them for such views? Probably not.
We understand that the government is highly challenged to implement land reform due to things such as poor and old farm infrastructure on land bought for resettlement, low production due to a lack of skills and knowledge among beneficiaries, and lack of markets for farm products.
It is not all a lost cause; we could still salvage the programme – provided we take a critical look at it and are prepared to accept that we had it wrong all these years. Let’s start now. Let’s start today.