Land reform releases resettlement list

THE land reform ministry has succumbed to threats of legal action and handed over the full list of resettlement beneficiaries to the ombudsman.

Ombudsman John Walters told yesterday he had received the full list of beneficiaries of the resettlement programme, but that he will only make it available to the public after studying it in detail.

The issue of the beneficiaries’; list had sparked intense debate between the government and various civil society organisations which have been calling for its release over the past few years, with the programme itself heavily criticised by various groups, including the Landless People’;s Movement (LPM), for being disproportionately in favour of certain ethnic groups at the expense of others.

Walters first asked for the list in May this year, but the ministry said they needed to get a legal opinion from the attorney general first.

The ombudsman then threatened the ministry with legal action if they continued withholding the list meant for the benefit of the public. Walters said he wanted the list to verify “complaints from people who were unhappy with the resettlement programme”.

reported last month that several government officials had benefited from the programme since 2011.

Among those are former ministers, deputy ministers, permanent secretaries and directors who were resettled across the country on 99-year leaseholds.

“Yes, I have received what I can say is the full list of beneficiaries from the Ministry of Land Reform today [yesterday]. All I can say is that the list is from the 90s because I saw that some people were resettled in 1992,” Walters stated.

The figures released by the Namibia Statistics Agency show that by 2018, the government had bought 496 resettlement farms since independence, and allocated them to over 5 300 beneficiaries across the country

The ombudsman, however, said “when I made my calculations, I was able to confirm that the total number of farms on the list is 449, on which 5 731 beneficiaries were resettled”.

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