Eric L Ndala

It is common knowledge that land is the principal asset in the rural economy, hence landlessness is strongly correlated with poverty, coupled with a lack of access to other socio-economic amenities in rural Namibia. 

This confirms the general perception that the highly- skewed distribution of land in Namibia is one of the important causes of widespread poverty, particularly in rural areas. As a consequence, socio-economic development is constrained. 

Namibia’s negotiated transition to political independence ensured that economic structures, especially land ownership by white farmers, remained largely intact after independence. Despite various attempts by the Namibian government to reform the social and economic structure and provide basic services for all (such as education and health), and despite several policy interventions aimed at redressing the colonial and apartheid legacies, and extending social protection, Namibia still ranks amongst the most unequal societies in the world (Jauch, 2012, p. 12). Its Gini coefficient of 59.1 in 2015 was second only to South Africa. Regional disparities in both economic opportunities and access to land and other services are large and keep widening, even after independence. The UNDP country representative in Namibia, Alka Bhatia, also stated that Namibia is doing well in reducing poverty, but not enough is being done to reduce inequality in the country (The Namibian, 2022.08.02).

Landlessness to agricultural land, to housing/residential land, to grazing or gathering of wild food, are the most important contributors to rural poverty, especially among the San communities in Namibia. Though access to land is considered essential for poverty reduction in rural areas, it may not alone be sufficient to reduce poverty and fuel economic development because of other factors that drive the growth of the agriculture sector. These include the higher use of conventional inputs such as water; fertilisers and seed; adequate rural infrastructure such as roads and electricity; increase in total factor productivity that depends on agricultural research and extension services; and targeted transformation in the institutional set-up, including financial institution inputs and output markets. These are some areas reform should be focused on to design and implement a pro-poor land acquisition and redistribution policy and institutional transformation to reduce landlessness and eradicate poverty. This is in line with the Namibian social policy of poverty eradication, and not poverty reduction. It is because poverty reduction is the diplomatic or political strategy of perpetuating poverty.

Another ambiguity in Namibia is the issue of defining landlessness, because there is no threshold or land ceiling which could be a basis for determining landlessness in the country in general. Therefore, one may use the working definition that landlessness is a socio-economic phenomenon which refers to access to plots of land too small or of poor quality to provide a minimum livelihood under existing land use patterns and technical capabilities, relative to the prevailing land tenure policy and legislation in a given environment, region or country. Namibia needs a land policy that prescribes landlessness in the context of its land reform programme.

Policies and legislations dealing with land acquisition and redistribution are focusing on the fragmentation of big, productive farms into some units exclusively for livestock farming without taking into consideration other land use needs. According to the Resettlement Policy of 1995, there are three main types of landless people in the Namibian context. The first category are people who need land for subsistence agriculture and the establishment of homes/residential property. Most of the San communities fall within this category of landlessness. These are people who have no land, no income and no livestock, but need small pieces, maybe 20 h, of land to establish a home. 

The second category of landless are people who need land to graze their livestock and conduct other supplementary agricultural activities, and build better houses. These are the majority of people who live in communal areas of Namibia. Some of these people have no land, no income, but have little livestock which they intend to grow and become small or medium commercial farmers. 

The third category of landless people are those who have income, livestock and have access to some land, but they need more land, probably more than 1000 ha, to expand their agricultural enterprises as commercial farmers. These are mostly the middle-class and working group, who are able to buy livestock but cannot afford to buy big farms to expand their farming activities. Although the National Resettlement Policy (NRP) mentions these three categories of landlessness, the land allocation process has little regard for those landless who need land for residential or small agricultural activities such as crop, poultry, piggery or horticulture production. Instead, the NRP focused too much on allocating land for ‘big’ commercial farming activities, mostly livestock (cattle, goats and sheep). For the policy to be more inclusive, small but reasonable portions of agricultural land should be allocated to those who are in need for such small economic activities. These sentiments are being expressed by many landless Namibians.  

Another pertinent question is: What caused this phenomenon of landlessness in Namibia? For those who may not be aware, there are various causes of landlessness in different countries of the world, but they are somehow similar and related in most parts of Asia and Africa, and Namibia is no exception. The three major interrelated forces that moulded traditional patterns of land ownership into its current fragmented and unequal conditions are: (a) the intervention of European rule through colonisation in Africa and elsewhere; (b) the progressive introduction of monetised transactions through the market (capitalism), coupled with the rise in power of the money-lender; and (c), the rapid growth of populations. 

For Namibia, land dispossession by the German colonial rule and South Africa’s apartheid administrations have contributed to the prevailing landlessness among rural communities, especially in the central and southern regions of Namibia, where indigenous communities were forcefully dispossessed of their land. As a consequence, most landless people depend on fulltime employment and subsistence farming as the main source of income to sustain their livelihoods. Other landless people depend on social grants (pension) and remittances as a main source of income. These social grants have become the socio-economic mainstay of the landless, and the socially and economically vulnerable communities in Namibia.

This shows that economic growth alone is not sufficient for poverty eradication. There is a need to pay attention to or put in place policies and schemes that promote social justice and the equitable distribution of resources, especially land. Land, being a multidimensional resource, should be distributed and administered in a holistic and inclusive manner.  There is also a need to develop and implement, on a regular basis, a monitoring and evaluation system to assess the impact of land redistribution and other related schemes on the poor landless beneficiaries. It appears that both agricultural/ economic growth and poverty eradication could be achieved if land inequality is eradicated. According to Manprasert and Rahman (2006, p.56), when the degree of landlessness increases, the standard of living decreases. To eradicate poverty, Namibia needs to review or develop deliberate but effective policies that would concentrate resource allocation in those communal areas with high populations, where 70% of the population depends on agriculture, and that is where development must take place. To achieve equitable and sustainable socio-economic development requires not only resource mobilization, but strong political will to ensure that such policies are indeed implemented and properly monitored. 

* Dr. Eric L. Ndala holds a PhD in Public Policy and Administration, and writes in his own capacity as a policy analyst.