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Home / Councillor calls for piloting of FLT regulations
Councillor calls for piloting of FLT regulations
2015-08-07Staff Report 2 Windhoek City of Windhoek Councillor Fransina Kahungu is concerned that if the mass land servicing programme does not include members of savings groups, such as the Shack Dwellers Federation (SDF) they may be left out. “Very soon there will be serviced land available for people who applied for land, but how will members of [established] savings groups fit into this?” she asked during an interview with New Era on Wednesday. Kahungu believes that members of savings groups would benefit from the Flexible Land Tenure (FLT) system. The FLT concept was developed to provide affordable and secure tenure to poorer urban settlers. The aim of FLT is to address the issue of equitable and needs-oriented access to land, thereby complementing efforts already undertaken under the national land reform programme. Furthermore, the mass clearing and servicing of land should be done concurrently with the piloting of the Flexible Land Tenure System regulations (Act of No 4 of 2012), she said. “Our main concern here is ownership of land. Those in savings groups can only be saved by the Flexible Land Tenure system,” the councillor stressed. “The piloting and mass clearing and servicing of land must take place at the same time and it must be done as fast as possible so that the members of the savings groups are not left behind,” she noted. “Many of the members of savings groups were allocated a portion of land to divide among themselves. This portion of land that is supposed to be distributed among them varies in size from 150 up to 300 square meters. “If you are going to avail enough land it means that even some members of the savings groups, who might have saved enough are now in a position to buy a portion of land that is bigger than 300 square meters,” Kahungu reasoned. She said it is imperative that a pilot study based on the Flexible Land Tenure system regulations should be conducted in Windhoek to run concurrently with the mass land-servicing programme. “Those who are going to get land through mass land servicing will get land as soon as possible, but the savings groups members will still have to struggle if the implementation of the Flexible Land tenure is not taking place. 2015-08-07Staff Report 2
