Mangetti farmers to boycott meeting

MEMBERS of the Mangetti Farmers’ Association will boycott a meeting organised by the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement to discuss the division of farmland in the northern communal areas.

The meeting is scheduled for Monday at the Oshikoto Regional Council offices at Omuthiya. A separate meeting between the Ministry and the Ondonga traditional authority is scheduled on the same day.
The farmer’s association decided on the boycott at a meeting held at the Oluno Community Hall over the weekend.
They said they wanted the traditional authority to be part of the meeting with the Ministry.
The farmers are not happy with Government’s plan to divide communal farmland in the Oshikoto and Ohangwena regions into units of five square kilometres in order to make space for cattle owners evicted from Western Kavango.
They say the traditional authority gave them the land and Government cannot take it away from them.
‘Why do they want to discuss with us [farmers and traditional authority] separately while we will be discussing the same thing? They will not settle the [evicted] Ukwangali farmers on our land, they are the ones who created the problem, not us. They must settle them in the big farms in the south, not here’, said the Chairperson of the Mangetti Farmers’ Association, Ismael Shailemo.
‘Our farms are already small and can’t bear the burden of more livestock as we already have a large number of livestock here,’ asked Martin Haikali, another leader of the association.
The farmers also complained that the Ministry of Works was flattening farm fences in the Mangetti farming area to create the border between the Kavango Region and the former Owambo.