The determinant factor in livelihoods improvement efforts in Southern Africa remains land. 

Land is the problem. However, we contest provocatively that the land reform programme in Namibia has an oxymoronic effect. 

Therefore, it is our considered opinions that, without contestations and casting of aspersions, land is central to economic properlarity of any national economy.  

In the specific case of Namibia, we have enacted two important Parliamentary Acts, namely the Communal Land Reform and the Commercial Agricultural Land Reform Acts, respectively. Complementary to these important Parliamentary Acts are the institutionalised mechanism that gave rise to the statutory establishment of both Council of Traditional Leaders and the Agricultural Bank of Namibia. 

These are authorities when it comes to Land Reform in Namibia.  

Under the commonage, traditional authorities are trustees. 

Commercially, AgriBank and the agriculture ministry (through the Resettlement Directorate) are vested with such a rights.  

For clarity, it is prudent that we firstly define the roles and powers of these important institutions in relation to land reform. 

Herein, our reference to land reform is simplified for common men to mean the role and responsibilities of traditional authorities in the administration, management, control and use of communal lands.

AgriBank and the Resettlement Directorate are over agricultural commercial lands. 

Both roles and responsibilities are in the context of restorative justice.

Paradoxically, the relationship between the traditional authorities and AgriBank in the context of land reform is convoluted to an extent it has contributed to extreme public harm within the realm of rights – human rights. 

The rights of Namibians to land have been violated through land reform. 

For obvious reasons, such mischief has had adverse impacts on the attainment of other complementary goals – being it social, economic, political and developmental for which the land reform programme was envisaged to achieve. 

It is disturbing that whilst there are recognisable signposts, alarmingly so over the implementation of the national land reform programme in Namibia, it continues to be business as usual. 

After solid 33 years of independence, landlessness, dispossession as well as land ownership inequality and evictions remain unresolved.  

Is it true that we are not witnessing land corruption and/or landrot through the national land reform programme in Namibia?  

The administrative nature of the reform programme has been red flagged twice in a row through deliberations of national land conferences of 1992 and 2018, respectively.

This was specifically over the question of restoration of ancestral land rights, allocation of communal land rights, allotment of resettlement units and financing of emerging commercial black farmers through the affirmative action loan scheme.

 These public harmful acts are being blatantly ignored if not being politically shelved with impunity.

It will be a grave mistake for all and sundry, including the Southern African region, to continue placing a blind eye on an inhumane mannerism over the implementation of the land reform programme in Namibia. 

The programme is sphere-headed by individuals whose interests are questionable, corrupt and tribally oriented.  

If due recognition is to be given that land is an embodiment of societal spirituality, such must remain centrally important for production and reproduction of culture, construction of identity and organisation of religious life. 

Additionally, implementation of land reform policies and programmes must take cognizance that “the link across generations is ultimately defined by the complement of land resources which families, lineages and communities share and control”.

The problem with the reform programme is that it is administratively implemented to cause public harm. This public harm is eminent. 

It can be worse than the unresolved Fishrot scandal. It has robbed a majority of Namibians of their dignities for the past 33 years. 

These violations are a result of state sanctioned systemic land dispossessions as the continuation of colonial injustices endured. 

The land reform porogramme has been systematically hijacked by the elites through tribal and political-elitism syndrome. 

It presupposes land to be allotted to certain tribal individuals of certain political orientations for the past 33 years at the expense of landless, vulnerable, colonially and genocidally dispossessed and internally displaced nation-communities. 

This has contributed to evictions, tribal tensions, extreme poverty, under-development and hunger, fuelled by landlessness and reversed landownership inequality.

Worse, the beneficiaries of land reform in Namibia are not being selected in accordance with the intended criterions. 

Officials who occupy key positions in government are enlisting themselves as beneficiaries at the expense of the needy communities. 

This applies to the administration and management of both commercial and communal lands within the legal framework of the land reform programme.

The danger is that traditional authorities and AgriBank are one of the strategic partners in the land reform programme.

 Their ineffectiveness is clearly demonstrated to be of a systemic nature of purposefully hijacked state sanctioned institutions deviating from rationality. This is because the continued unabated functioning of these important institutions has created public impatience through the reversal of land-ownership inequalities, potentially threatening peace and stability in Namibia. 

If left unattended, worse will be shortly experienced by all and sundry.  

Oxymoronically, the percentage of Namibians who have genuinely benefitted from the land reform programme from 1992 to 2024 will be less than 15% – by extension 10%. 

This complex provocative statistical hypothesis is based on the number of rights currently assured in communal areas, de facto ownership of communal lands and private enclaves and the number of affirmative action loan schemes active (including repossessed farms and obtained default judgments).

In addition, it is based on the number of foreign owned units, the size of state land leased by foreigners, the number of farmers in corridors and the number of (farm) evictions, including displacements of generational farm workers, and the number of internally displaced Namibian nation-communities as well as land transactions.   

We remain optimistic in the promising government – whose promises, decisions and programmes invoke positivity.

 We hope this piece will provoke a more robust public debate on the question of the national land reform programme and the need to hold traditional authorities, AgriBank and the Resettlement Directorate accountable over it. 

We look forward for an ignited healthier, non-tribal, apolitical and professionalised public discourse on the subject matter moving forward.             

*Shaun Gariseb is a human rights defender and regional social justice activist. 

*Jarii Tjeja-uaTjatindi is a human rights defender and Africa’s civic engagement practitioner.