By Mbatjiua Ngavirue
There is growing bitterness among people who have applied for resettlement as many as 10 or 15 times without success, and without ever receiving proper explanations for the failure of their applications.
Manie Ross, aged 50, has applied for resettlement 10 times over the last six years, but many others have applied 15 or more times without succeeding.
He is not a wealthy man, farming at Otjivero-Omitara resettlement camp with only 11 cattle, 28 goats and six donkeys.
He is however unhappy that the Ministry has resettled people without any livestock at all, while repeatedly rejecting the applications of someone with at least some animals.
He says he can no longer farm at Omitara because the place has become what he describes as a “shebeen land” since Nampower brought electricity to the settlement.
He turns 51 in September this year and is now worried that the company he works for might retrench him, leaving him with nowhere to go.
“They might say I have become too old, and that I must make way for a younger person and where do I go then?”
He last applied for resettlement on Mooifontein No. 564 not far from Rehoboth in the Hardap Region.
He started farming while living with his father at Omitara, and remained there when the government evicted other small scale-farmers in 1997.
Ross however says his father objected to the manner in which former Deputy-Director of Resettlement Simeon Kanyemba ordered people to move out of the Otjivero-Omitara resettlement camp.
“People were not given enough notice. They were not ready; some had not even packed while others had their belongings at other places.”
In the end, the government moved approximately 25 families from Omitara for resettlement at the farm Kalaharipragt.
The most troubling aspect for Ross is that in most cases the Ministry of Lands never even gave him the courtesy of informing him that his application had failed.
Only in the case of his application for resettlement on the farm Boom Lager/Kambinga, the ministry told him: ‘We have already decided and allocated the farming units to other people.’
“I know I am going to be blacklisted if I complain, but I feel I have to do something, because of my age,” Ross said.
The farms he has applied for include Boom Laager, Corsica No. 89, Anias S??????’??