Hosea Shishiveni Neumbo
According to the World Food Program’s latest Hunger Hotspots report, there are 43 million people in 38 countries at the risk of famine or a serious food crisis unless they receive immediate life-saving support. Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Yemen are the countries with the highest levels of hunger.
Surprisingly, Namibia did not make it to the list. Does that mean people are not starving in Namibia?
It cannot be a country of fewer than three million inhabitants where about one million people allegedly live in shacks. Shacks symbolise poverty, which is always associated with hunger. If there are leaders who disagree, let them swap houses with those residing in informal settlements, such as Babylon and Okahandja Park. They will refuse.
The government’s desire to lease out the 11 green schemes to foreign investors is unappealing to many Namibians who aspire to be agribusiness people. For decades, Namibia has been dependent on South Africa in terms of food. Namibia spends billions of dollars on imported goods, of which many are fresh produce and other processed foods from our neighbouring countries, particularly South Africa.
Have we ever thought of what will happen if South Africa locks its borders abruptly? Namibians will perish from hunger since we are heavily dependent on South Africa for food. This will be the government’s fault for failing to secure food security for the past 32 years. Imagine a country with so many rivers and an ocean that is still importing water from South Africa.
Despite President Hage Geingob urging young people to start using their qualifications to innovate and create jobs rather than depend on the government for employment, it seems like minister Carl-Hermann Schlettwein holds a different view.
The two are putting the government in a contradictory state because they are not singing the same song. The minister of agriculture is contrary to the president’s idea.
He believes Namibians cannot operate the green schemes, thus he is opting for foreign investors, which is bad for local businesses and has made the Namibia Local Business Association (Naloba) and other local associations angry. Naloba strongly condemned the minister’s decision and labelled it as unfair.
When will we give chances to our graduates? Why do we even have universities if we can not provide jobs for our graduates? The green schemes should be handed over to local business owners if the government is failing to maintain them, and if they are also failing, then the government can go to foreign investors.
Recently, a nine-year-old girl was run over by a vehicle for picking beans on a white man’s farm. All these are results of hunger, yet we have the minister of agriculture opening up the green schemes for international investors while his people are being killed for picking up beans.
We have Chinese bosses shooting our people at their workplaces. What makes the government think that investors from Dubai will not act similarly?
I give credit to the government for maintaining peace and stability since 1990.
Our government has done well to ensure the country is politically stable, but it has massively failed to provide food for its people. People are going to bed on hungry stomachs.
HIV/AIDS patients are walking long distances to health centres to collect ARVs and still take them on hungry stomachs. Pupils in rural areas are walking long distances to attend classes on empty stomachs which makes it difficult to concentrate and catch up during lessons. Streets in central towns are full of hungry people begging for food. The impact of food insecurity will do the greatest damage to our economy and state. The government is slowly but surely creating zombies in our country.
When people get tired of hunger, they will start thinking with their stomachs becoming hard to control, which will result in looting. We have ample time to correct all this. We shouldn’t wait until it is too late to act.
We have adequate land.
We also have more than 10 green schemes. The government is not merely failing to solve housing and land issues being experienced in the country. It has fatally failed to provide land for agricultural purposes to its people.
Opening up the green schemes to foreign competition proves how happy the government is to see locally-owned businesses suffocating or being dominated by foreign-owned firms. Leasing out the available green schemes to international investors over local investors will show how determined the government is in destroying local businesses.
The Namibian government has already failed to provide market protection to local businesses from international competitors.
While South Africans are pushing for the amendment of Section 25 of their constitution in pursuit of land expropriation without paying compensation, the Namibian government is busy selling land to foreign countries such as China and the USA to build their embassies while government ministries are renting privately-owned buildings. Namibian people should probably forget owning land because the government has failed to secure land for itself to construct more public offices.
This is a great opportunity to improve and boost our farming and agriculture industries. With a large expanse of unoccupied land, we still have 43.3% of Namibia’s population living in poverty. We cannot produce enough food to feed our people.
Traffic lights in the capital city of Namibia are full of job beggars. Don’t we see them every day? Most of those people begging for jobs at every corner in Windhoek, particularly the ones at the traffic lights, are over 30 and uneducated.
It is hard to take those people back to school, but Naloba, together with the ministry of agriculture, can collaborate to create employment opportunities. That can only come to reality if the government withdraws its RFP offer to international investors.
Naloba narrated that the country cannot have its green schemes operated by foreigners while Namibians are capable of running them sustainably. Where they struggle, they will seek help from other African countries that are doing well in agriculture, such as Tunisia, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda or South Africa. If they fail to get the assistance that is when they will seek expert assistance from the Middle East, America, Europe and Asia.
Is the government that buys plastic rice from Shoprite to hand over to people as food relief serious about combating malnutrition and poverty in the country? The food bank was a great initiative, but the fact that the government buys most of the food from retail shops that are expensive and not even locally-owned makes the whole initiative ineffective.
If the government seriously wants to end poverty in Namibia, why doesn’t it provide land to grow food? Why doesn’t the government splash or invest those millions into green schemes and recruit unemployed people to produce its rice that can be handed over to the nation in the form of food relief and sell the surplus to retail shops?
Investing in agriculture will ensure economic transformation, food security, and nutrition. Agricultural modernisation prepares conditions for industrialisation by boosting labour productivity, increasing agricultural surplus to accumulate capital, and increasing foreign exchange through exports.
This would also result in a decrease in food prices, which have skyrocketed since the invasion of Russia into Ukraine.
The government should conduct a feasibility study on the Zambezi and Kavango regions. Those three provinces can feed the whole of Namibia. The regions receive plenty of rain, and their soils are rich in nutrients.