The Chinese curse, ‘May you live in exciting times’ is upon us. Maybe this time the excitement is more scary than exciting.
The Affirmative Repositioning (AR) youth have done the nation a great deal of good, and that is to place before our eyes and on our tongues an issue that needs to be addressed. At the same time, it would be wrong to either expect the youth to lead the way towards a better land reform regime, nor are the youth capable of directing the way forward. All that the youth can do is challenge the leadership on the issue and this it did.
There is now an awareness that something must happen to make land available to those who need it and who can make meaningful use of it. The current conversations must now be placed in a container that will allow positive energies and available resources to flow in the direction that can aid the citizens not only find space to live, but to take ownership of their circumstances and not become too dependent on the state.
The government is there not only for the landless and the angry, but also for the rich, the land owners and even those who have no aspirations to have land. It is just unfortunate that the state has not managed this situation well and was caught flatfooted. It cannot be good for a stable democracy to have a situation where the youth are setting the agenda and the state limping from one uncertainty to another, mainly due to poor management of relations.
There is no doubt that there is a lot of suffering in the land, yet not all of the poverty is related to lack of land. Poverty manifests itself in different forms and different fashions. Countries that took a better handle on poverty approached it from the angle of mounting a campaign to provide shelter first.
Once a person has a decent place to sleep and call home, their dignity is restored. It would appear that what we are quarreling about here is not so much land as such, but homes or houses. Both the Government’s language of poverty eradication and AR’s language of fighting for land are not quite appropriate.
The Government’s efforts are towards poverty reduction, not poverty eradication, which is not achievable. They say it is better to under-promise and over-deliver than to over-promise and under-deliver. Reducing poverty is more realistic than poverty eradication. Not even rich countries have eradicated poverty.
First and foremost, we must agree on the concepts that we are using so that we can move towards the same desired outcomes.
In other words, we are really not quarreling about land but about housing. Most of the consternation is not for farmland, but decent accommodation in urban cities where people are living lives that they would not have lived if they were in rural Namibia, where there is plentiful land.
The government would have done much better if it said that there would be no Namibian in the next twenty years without a decent home – wherever they are. That the government would provide the basic materials for constructing these human settlements and teach people how to build, maintain and improve on their own structures.
This campaign would be in tandem with aggressive rural development to make the hinterlands attractive and worthy of living a decent life in. While Namibia is still small and young, there ought to be a bias towards putting resources and infrastructure into rural Namibia to make most people’s birthplaces attractive places to work and live and not just return to be buried. Organs of state ought to be readying themselves to provide shelter for the people in all the regions so that the pressure on the cities is lessened.
Government ought to introduce stiff regulation of property and accommodation prices across the country so that people can afford a place to live. In addition, the Government under President Geingob would go a long way if it were to lead in the following areas with haste:
Reduce the wage bill by trimming the state bureaucracy to a minimum that is practical and functional commensurate with the size of the population. An enlarged National Assembly, an oversized cabinet with an unwarranted number of deputy ministers with so many advisors in the government bureaucracy, can only make it difficult for the Head of State to champion the cause that Namibia is a poor country that needs assistance from the outside, and to fight poverty.
Introduce national service for two years and skills development: Idle youth is a dangerous ticking time bomb. Part of education and training should be an introduction of a post-high school national service programme for the youth, for two years.
All learners upon completing high school should be dispersed thematically and programmatically throughout the 13 plus one regions to work/learn/develop appetite in all sectors of the economy, including agriculture, health care, the military and police so that they get a sense of the real world after which they can more informed decisions about what careers to choose.
Enforce Minimum Wage: All work should have value, including serving in restaurants which, by law, ought to have a minimum wage. People go to restaurants to eat, not to pay salaries. Stamp out car guards and compel shopping malls to provide security, and channel these young people into life skills.
Establish a public transport system: Namibia is vast and roomy.
Serious efforts must be made towards a creation of a public transport system to link all the nodes together for purposes of easy movement of goods, people and labour. Admittedly, starting with the defence efforts before independence and the government’s efforts, there are good public roads to build on. No economy develops meaningfully without a decent public transport system to carry people, goods and services across the land.
Relax immigration laws: The current immigration laws are too prohibitive for rapid investment and development to happen. Difficult though it is as a reality, the ten-year limit on the acquisition of citizenship after marrying a Namibian is way too long. Not even countries such as the USA with more reason to prohibit illegality in immigration do not have such a long period. Two-three years with strict monitoring would suffice.
Namibia’s population is too small to buttress fast economic growth. It would not hurt to adopt a deliberate immigration mechanism that would facilitate smoother absorption of special quotas of Afrikans, African-Americans and Germans who wish to make Namibia their home and grow the economy with special incentives for economic growth and expansion in rural Namibia.
Introduce and encourage corporate citizenship for the private sector:
Ramatex outside of Windhoek: The public-private partnership logic ought to be contextualized in real and practical terms by working out areas in education and training where the state is supported by the business to channel skills into good citizenship and good citizenship into skills.
The private sector ought to come in more to absorb a number of university, technikon and VTC students in their final year into their industries.
The Ramatex model ought to be revisited as long as it is not in Windhoek but outside.
The current land reform process is to be supported and augmented with a carefully selected team of Namibians to do an objective study of the availability of land per region and town such that the study would inform the government’s policies on (a) who qualifies to get a piece of land where and for what purpose; (b) what relevant but strict criteria and rules apply for land allocation; (c) the time limits on acquired yet unused land; (d) what relevant and fair and transparent penalties be in place for abuses of these lands; (e) protection of communal lands that are governed by traditions in order to safeguard tribal land from the seizures of the rich and the connected; and (f) how to streamline all these reforms such they are not repugnant to the supreme law of the land, the Constitution of the Republic of Namibia, and the Overall Authority of the State with the President as the Thinda ShaDitunga: the First Citizen of the Republic.
On the part of the youth generally and AR youth in particular, there is need for mindset shift from anger to supportive cooperation, from oppositional to propositional engagement with the Government, to focus more on issues that affect the majority of the citizens, many of whom have more pressing challenges than just land.
The AR youth would establish a stronger legacy going forward if it expanded its logic and modus operandi beyond plots in selected areas to what is real stratagems and tactics to restore dignity to the majority of our people, many of whom do not wish to own sellable land in the metropolis of Namibia.
Farmlands are for a few, but decent shelter is for all. First and foremost, the youth, which will be the old folks sooner than they realize it, will earn more respect from the general populace and the pages of history if they focus on issues that are not just about themselves. Anger and unnecessary inflammatory language on the part of the youth leadership is always helpful as it inspires than offends.
The liberation struggle that was waged by our leaders was not for personal gain or personal recognition, but to make the world a better place for all. History never likes those who build castles for themselves. It would be good for the youth and the country if the youth could join hands with Government to mortgage a better Namibia.
The youth ought to be seen to be on the side of the masses struggling to make ends meet, not in support of real estate developers. As a matter of urgency, the youth ought to press the Ministry of Trade to decree that users of our national roads DO NOT pay to use toilet facilities at fuel stations, as it should be part of the business licence to provide a toilet everywhere in the country.
The youth ought to be seen to champion a greater fight for decency and dignity regardless of class, position or title.