KEETMANSHOOP – Councillor Willem Labuschagne says Namibia’s resettlement policy is to blame for recent land grab incidents in Hardap and Omaheke regions.
The Keetmanshoop Rural constituency councillor made these remarks while contributing towards the Ministry of Industrialisation and Trade’s budget vote last week in the National Council (NC).
He is on the Landless People’s Movement card in the NC.
Pointing to some shortcomings of the resettlement policy, he said “it is inconsistent for a commercial farm bought for resettlement purposes to be sub-divided into farming units, as it affects production and quality performance cruelly.”
Labuschagne said despite government acquiring more than three million hectares of productive land over time and intending to get 1.5 million more hectares, the resettlement policy lacks effectiveness and efficiency in the absence of hands-on monitoring and evaluation.
The politician attributed this to unfair and prejudiced land allocation of resettlement units, inconsiderate of acquired farms in smaller farming units which hinder productive farming, “poor agricultural productivity on resettlement units due to various factors, including a lack of skills, capacity and mentoring beneficiaries, as well as poor overall coordination of land and agricultural policies and frameworks, of which the National Resettlement Policy, is a failure”.
Earlier this year, land reform minister Calle Schlettwein admitted that Namibia’s ambitious land reform policy failed to reach its intended outcomes, despite recording some successes.
“We acknowledge that the land reform programme, particularly the resettlement process, has been slow and ineffective.”
He made this statement while tabling the new National Resettlement Policy 2023/2033 in the National Assembly.
The new resettlement policy will replace the one which has been in place for the past decade. According to the minister, the outdated policy has not allowed the government to effectively address the land question, particularly around who should benefit from the resettlement process.
He furthermore cited the mismatch between the policy and the criteria for the allocation of acquired land as loopholes in the existing policy.
Due to this shortcoming, he said most of the acquired land has been allocated to individuals with no capacity to productively use it. In the absence of monitoring and evaluation data, Schlettwein opined that agricultural production on most of the resettlement farms has declined, compared to when such farms were under private ownership.
He attributed this to lack of skills, training and insecure land tenure rights, lack of marketing, poor farm infrastructure, water scarcity, limited credit, small land size, animal diseases and theft.
At the time, the minister seemingly gave credence to the perception that the land allocation modalities favour already privileged or well-off individuals.
He further acknowledged the absence of pre-and-post settlement support, which includes adequate, structured and coordinated support to resettlement beneficiaries as one of the main reasons for the poor agricultural productivity in most of the resettlement farms.
“Most resettlement farms seem to lack management capacity and basic agricultural skills, hence their perpetual reliance on random government support,” Schlettwein said at the time.
According to the national resettlement policy [2023-2033], under the national resettlement process, the government has targeted the acquisition and distribution of five million hectares of commercial agricultural land by 2030.
So far, only 513 commercial farms totalling 3.1 million hectares of land have been acquired and allocated to over 5 300 beneficiaries since independence. While figures of landless Namibians in need of resettlement are unavailable, the policy estimates that a total of 243 000 Namibians need land.
At the heart of Namibia’s land reform policies is addressing remnants of past injustices such as apartheid and colonialism, which denied indigenous Namibians ownership of land.
The national resettlement programme, which the government adopted in the 1990s, allows the government to buy freehold land to resettle landless Namibians.
It has followed the controversial “willing buyer, willing seller” principle.
Added to this is the Affirmative Action Loan Scheme, which allows formerly disadvantaged people to get subsidised loans through Agribank to buy land.
Hope
After persistently failing to come close to its land reform targets, the government now hopes to reach it by 2033 through the 2023/2033 land resettlement policy.
The government has promised to change the status quo by ensuring that the right people benefit from the resettlement programme.
According to the new resettlement plan, only Namibian citizens who do not own and who were socially, economically and educationally discriminated against by previously discriminatory laws or practices are entitled to benefit.
It also seeks to address the existing skewed land ownership by placing formerly disadvantaged Namibians into the mainstream of the national economy.
The new resettlement plan has categorised resettlement into three models tailored to the vying land needs of the eligible beneficiaries. One of them is the higher economic model, which targets the empowerment of mainly landless commercial farmers farming on leased commercially-viable agricultural land, which is privately-owned or belongs to local authorities.
Under the proposed policy, only commercially-oriented communal farmers with well-established farming ventures in communal areas but who cannot secure agricultural loans from banks, as affirmative action candidates, fall under this category.
Meanwhile, the small to medium-sized communal farmers in overcrowded areas whose farm ventures are threatened by the environment in which they operate will now be listed under the moderate economic value model, which targets people who have demonstrated through their ongoing farming ventures in communal areas that they can farm commercially, if provided with the opportunity to do so.
The envisaged model provides an effective way to decongest overcrowded commercial areas. While the low economic value model targets landless citizens who are neither farming in communal areas nor leasing on privately-owned commercial farmland, it also includes those without access to capital, low-income earners, and those without income but who want to venture into small- scale farming.
“This policy will require a regular review of the current resettlement selection criteria in order to ensure that it is tailored according to the specific model of resettlement suggested herein, and that the land acquired and made available for allotment should be targeted toward beneficiaries falling within those categories,” said the minister.