Dear President Hage Geingob
Firstly, we want to wish you good health and everything else beautiful in your life. To start with, we want to thank you for initiating Namibia’s Second National Land Conference, which took place in October 2018. With the realisation of that conference which your predecessor President Hifikepunye Pohamba ignored or perhaps did not see the need for, showed your interest in the plight of Namibia’s landless communities. It is now almost five years since the conference took place and as a community who have also submitted our ancestral land claim, we are disheartened and sad to learn that despite the more than 160 resolutions given, the government has never reverted to the different communities and individuals and update the nation on the progress and status of the submitted ancestral land right claims. The commission, which was appointed by you, Mr. President, travelled the length and breadth of Namibia to engage the communities but almost five years down the line and we don’t even know what specific purpose the commission serves.
As for us, the Gubagub Landless Community (GLC), it seems that we will continue being landless Namibians in our own country, despite having been robbed of hundreds of thousands of hectares of land by the former colonial and apartheid masters.
It has become evident that in a post independent Namibia our ancestral land is reserved for the same previously advantaged white minorities, the rich foreigners and other Namibians but not us the rightful inhabitants of land in Khomas and in particular land in the Aris district.
As we speak, land transactions are happening under our noses and yet we continue being landless (farmland). We are appealing to you Mr. President to hear our cry and investigate the unjustifiable and non-transparent land deals in the /Khomas region.
When farms in other regions are offered, it is advertised in the local print media but for /Khomas we don’t think the same applies.
Mr. President, you are our last hope. Please don’t let ancestral land rights claims go in vain.
Constitutionally and as per the United Nations human rights protocols, we have the right to our ancestral land which bears graves of our forefathers and mothers. Even the poor deserves to be given land and then assisted by its own government to make something out of that land.
*Gubagub Landless Community (GLC)