Kuzeeko Tjitemisa
The Landless People’s Movement has called on President Hage Geingob to halt the country’s resettlement programme, describing it as skewed and in favour of the well-connected.
“We propose that the current resettlement programme be stopped and new modalities studied and implemented without any delays. Genocide victims must be prioritised by law in the resettlement progamme,” the party said in its 20-page document titled ‘Building a Capable State Post-Covid-19”.
Since its inception in 1991, the government’s resettlement programme has been faced with many challenges, amongst others accusations that the process is skewed and only benefits the well-off, the illegal subleasing of farms by those resettled to the wealthy and well-connected, and the lack of farming knowledge and skills amongst those benefiting from the initiative.
According to the LPM, the Namibian constitution has not done well for those who lost land in the country.
“Article 100 provides that all land, unless privately-owned, shall belong to the State. This means: maintain the colonial and apartheid land dispossession through constitutional provisions. Article 16 provides for land ownership individually and/or in association with others. But where is there any provision made to register title owned communally?”
“Open access land in Namibia is abused by State institutions, and tenure security lacks behind the freehold land titles. Where are the laws to protect others and not just individuals? Nowhere is historic land dispossession a key constitutional and legal demand to redress historic injustices,” the party said in the document submitted to Geingob during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday.
Yet, they said, the Namibian government pushed for a law where veterans of the liberation struggle are placed as priority recipients of land in the resettlement programme.
“Veterans never lost any single iota of land, and as such, the prioritisation of the veterans must be stopped with immediate effect. These are grave injustices,” stressed the movement.
Furthermore, they also bemoaned the mushrooming of informal settlements in urban areas, saying Namibia’s land administrators and town councils are failing to curb the rising trend with utmost disgust for people’s human dignity.
“Yet, flats are the norm as ruling elites and relatives obtain large swathes of urban land through corrupt land deals, at the expense of urban freehold housing schemes”.
According to the party, a new phenomenon of land markets has developed recently, which is fraught with the forceful removal of land owners from their homesteads in northern Namibia to make way for new merchants.
This is allegedly executed in cahoots with Chinese tycoons.
“The development of nature conservancies, geared toward protecting animal species like elephants, lions and leopards, have increased human-wildlife conflict, with communal land that was profitable for domestic farming now having become unlivable and dangerous for humans, such as in the Kunene and Zambezi regions,” the party said.
This land grab is celebrated as a “successful conservancy programme” that placed Namibia as one of the lead conservancy nations, alongside Botswana, but the human livelihood and inter-generational transfer of wealth cost is ignored, they added.
- ktjitemisa@nepc.com.na