Choice, Chance And Consternation
By: Alexactus T Kaure
THE land issue still enjoys widespread publicity and coverage. In its February edition, the New African magazine ran a four-page article on the land issue in Namibia: ‘Landless in the Land of the Brave’, written by Mabasa Sasa. I should have added ‘landless’ in a country that is the world’s 34th largest by area and with an estimated 2.4 million people.
The article starts by giving us the usual statistics, for example, that whites control 90 percent of the land and that 50 percent of the arable land is in the hands of just 4 000 white commercial farmers. And then it poses what I think is the pertinent question: ‘but how is it that this situation prevails 23 years after independence?’ To me this a very easy question to answer. When our would-be members of parliament were sitting in that Constituent Assembly to draw up our constitution, they all went into their capitalist mindset and decided that land is a property and not a natural resource and thus a common property.
Informed by that capitalist logic, the leadership or the government, to be specific, accepted ‘the market’ as the principal instrument or means of land (re)distribution. Thus, the Namibian government, instead of embarking on a redistributive land reform programme that would be based on utilising expropriation and land taxation as policy mechanism, it opted for a demand-led approach based on the policy of ‘willing-seller, willing-buyer’.
In this type of arrangement, the government has been the price-taker because the ‘owner’ of the land can demand any price he/she wants and the government often seemed willing to simply pay. And it must be said that the price of both commercial and urban land has been artificially excessively high. And the government is not even worried about that.
When we were drawing up our Constitution and policy framework that opted for the policy of a ‘willing seller, willing buyer’, there was already the Zimbabwean 10 years experience of land reform from which to draw lessons. But we didn’t, and neither did South Africa. Thus we had choices and chances but we basically blew them. Some people would argue that this scenario came about because of the pressure from the Western Five five ‘Contact Group’ which comprised Canada, France, Germany, UK and the USA. These are all palpable lies. Because the representatives of the Western Five were not sitting in the next chamber telling our policy-makers how to draw up our Constitution. The point is that we ignored the experience from our neighbour – Zimbabwe. But perhaps more importantly is that the incoming Swapo government was not committed to any radical change of the post-colonial economy, including land reform.
Unlike the case of South Africa, the Namibian government had nothing to do with restitution, precisely because it didn’t want to disturb the status quo in any radical manner. As Archie Mafeje has written: “The whole debate about land in Namibia is not about the livelihood of the dispossessed in the countryside but about how best to maintain the status quo. This could be true of white farmers, the government as well as the black notables in the so-called communal areas.”
In fact, anyone ‘who is who’ in Namibia owns a farm with some of them owning more than one. They have joined the big land barons, including absentee landlords, to acquire farms. Thus talk of land being a burning, sensitive issue is all rhetoric by the leadership to placate people that it is concerned about their plight and ready to address their land hunger both in the rural and urban areas. Otherwise they would have a policy in place that would say ‘one farmer, one farm’ and they would make sure that urban land, which is state land, is affordable to the majority of our people. Thus for the Swapo leadership the land issue is a ‘non-issue’, the rhetoric notwithstanding.
In SA they have three distinct component of land reform – restitution, redistribution and land tenure. In our case we had only the redistribution component until we came up with this weird policy of 20 hectares per person. I don’t know how they arrived at that ridiculous figure but I’m sure the Swapo leadership was saying ‘that is better than nothing’.
The rationale behind the resettlement programme was premised on the perceived scarcity of land in communal areas, thus the need to unlock some of the land held under private regime for resettlement, in order to ‘socialise’ more land, so to speak. Historically the most common political objective of land reform was to abolish colonial forms of land ownership, often by taking land from large-scale farmland and absentee ‘land owners’ and redistributing these to the landless. But instead of socialising more land we are basically privatising it. The Swapo leadership is creating one the greatest land problems of the 21st century. Most of us will be no more but certainly this is the problem they are creating for succeeding generations.