IMAGINE yourself camping in the north of Namibia, not on a guest farm or a campsite but in a rural settlement, the type that tourists, government officials, and NGO workers leave before the sun sets.
But now it is sunrise and you are a researcher from abroad wondering whether it is already time to get up or not. It is the kind of place where people do not have work.There are no regular working hours that make them get up at a certain time, only the tasks that they set themselves for the day.Then, suddenly, there is continual hooting of a rapidly approaching vehicle, two vehicles in fact.They stop right in front of your tent.Armed men with machine guns and pistols alight.They do not wear regular uniforms but they look very determined.If you are a local resident you will have guessed what this is all about: the monthly Old Age Pension money has arrived.The locals are flocking to the scene because they have already waited for at least two weeks, listening to the radio to hear when the pension monies will be delivered at this remote distribution point.A portable generator is switched on, the back of a vehicle opens and a computer keyboard and a screen emerge.The locals line up and have their pension cards ready.These are inserted into the machine that automatically produces N$300 for the pensioner, or N$600 if he or she was not paid the previous month.There is also a fingerprint recognition device; this is high-tech in the bush.And it works, at least as far as the distribution of the money is concerned.No counting and handling of money is necessary, no manipulation is possible.As soon as one container is finished, a new sealed box is docked onto the computer and continues to spit out three red notes for each pensioner.The technology works, but communication is another matter.As always, there are people who want to find out about their pension applications, or they hold old identity cards and birth certificates in their hands and want to find out when it is their turn to receive a pension because they cannot read and do not know their birth date – or what some civil servant has been decided to be their birth date.And this is where the problem of access begins.The men paying out the pensions are not the ones who take applications or who comment on them.They tell people they have to go to see the social workers in Tsumeb.But if the people manage to get a lift to that office (some 100km away), they are often sent straight on to the local office of the Ministry of Home Affairs because applications for pensions are only accepted if all papers are correct, and frequently they are not.If your birth certificate says you are 74 but the ID-card says you are only 61 they will not even accept your application for pension because the papers do not agree.The local office of the Ministry of Home Affairs will send the papers to Windhoek but usually the changes are not granted and as a result old age people are left without an old age pension.In other cases, the office may ask for copies of birth certificates certified by the local police or they may ask the person to come back another time .And in any case, they demand N$50 for any new ID and each person has to collect them in person.The bureaucratic and monetary hurdles are insurmountable for the cashless people from our rural settlement.The same applies when an old person is in fact much older than the ID indicates; in some cases his or her child may already receive an old age pension but they do not.I have taken very old people to the local doctor to have their age estimated.That worked in the past but now the old people are told they need to go to Windhoek or Oshakati to have an x-ray done, which amounts to saying, “forget it”.Or as a civil servant at the Ministry of Home Affairs has put it: “These people will always suffer”.Over the last five years, things have not changed.Except that some of the old people have died in the meantime.The technical facilities for providing people with pensions even in the remote parts of the country are there, but only if you have sufficient means to access your entitlements.This applies not only to old age people but also to many others who are excluded from access to services that are – in principle – available but in practice inaccessible.No income often means no access.This article is about people who are excluded from accessing benefits that are, in principle, meant to be for them and about the implication this has for the Namibian society at large.Take old //Ahesun for example.In 2000, the local doctor estimated her age to be well over 70.She was always one of the people standing stunned at the side when the pension money was distributed.The payment of pension money is a major event in her community because it exceeds any payday at the end of the month in terms of cash inflow since many farmers and corporations like NDC have laid off more and more workers over the past 15 years.Pensions are thus often the only reliable cash income, not only for individual pensioners but also for the community at large.And they trigger what may be called a whole developmental cycle.It takes the armored vehicles with the armed guards less than an hour to do their business and then they drive on to the next point.Less than an hour later another car arrives, a somewhat battered bakkie with a Rundu number plate.It is filled with huge bags of second-hand clothes.The same crowd that was there when the pension was paid out, reassembles to inspect the goods of the trader and to start spending the money.Firstly, practical problems emerge because three hundred dollars in three big notes are difficult to split.The trader has simple prices: N$20 for underwear, N$50 for shirts and so on.Everyone thinks these are outrageous prices but there is no other trader in sight, there is hardly transport to go anywhere and a lift costs you at least the price of a shirt.If you make it to Tsintsabis or Tsumeb with your pension money chances are unfortunately good that you are ripped off there, as well.After the second-hand clothes dealer has moved on to the next pay-point, the local farm shop opens.It is not only the pensioners who have been flocking to this place but people of all ages who expect a share of the goods that can be bought with that money.A local producer of liquor has also prepared herself for this day.But back to old //Ahesun.She is not drinking liquor, she never has.She has successfully brought up four children.One son lives further north, having a field of mahangu but is without cash income.One son lives further south, having a job with a farmer with the meagre income of N$400 every month.Two other children who already have children themselves live here but have no income at all.In other words //Ahesun is pretty much cut off from any income.In the past, she survived by collecting wild foodstuffs.But this source has been diminishing since more and more land has been taken away by livestock owners, agriculturalists and absentee “owners” who have fenced in new farms on what used to be communal land while living on paid jobs in the civil service or in business.Moreover, the excellent skills she had learned when coping with the variability of wild natural resources do not help her to understand when and how drought relief and other sources can be accessed.Some argue that the availability of drought relief follows political seasons more than actual droughts but to most people it is simply puzzling when and why some settlements attract overseas donors, government sources or non-governmental support while others do not.All that they feel, very crudely, is that they lack the political resources to access the material resources that are supposed to assist the poor landless people of Namibia.//Ahesun is particularly vulnerable not because she is now old and frail.Her family shares with her whatever they have, the kin-based solidarity is largely intact.But her kin and her neighbours have very little to share because they, too, are excluded.It is a subtle exclusion because it is realized under the cover of inclusionism.Years ago when people of //Ahesun’s comm
unity wanted to claim some of their land, they were told that they could apply for it just like anyone else but that there would be no way that they would receive group rights for their original land.The Mangetti-West farms will soon cease to be an NDC enterprise.Many people want that land on which the “San” currently live.It seems unlikely that the current occupants and traditional owners will benefit from the resettlement plans.The crux of the matter is that the threshold for applying for land is already too high and that it in fact excludes them.Take Eliab and Tsab, close relatives of //Ahesun at another settlement.Both have been in exile with Swapo and they can still proudly present their membership cards.They wanted to return to their original land instead of joining a development brigade.Eliab has been hanging on for 15 years now.He has seen visits of the Minister of Lands; he has been given a shovel to clear land and recently he has even been given wire to fence in a piece of land after he and his relatives had already been fenced out by businessman who excludes him and his kin from using the water.Access to water is a clear-cut right but when living in a remote part of the country without the necessary resources to even file a complaint such rights can become ineffective.The dilemma of being too weak to receive the benefits meant to help the poor is not limited to the question of rights to land, water, and secure residence but extends virtually to all parts of life.Clinics, in principle, should not refuse someone who has not even got the N$4 you usually pay.But it happens they are refused because it is not believed that they do not have those few dollars it takes.It happens regularly enough for people not even attempting to take the long trip to a clinic, unless a visiting researcher happens to be there who can provide a free lift and who can exert the moral authority to make clinic staff accept sick people without any payment.Or take school uniforms, something that was originally invented to create unity and equality amongst learners but which now creates a rigid divide between those who can afford the uniforms and others who cannot.Not having “proper clothes” is a frequent means of exclusion, also among adults.Just as with the money asked by clinics, it gains its own momentum of exclusion.The experience of having been excluded on the grounds of “being dirty” or “not properly dressed” discourages people to try again next time.Cultural stereotypes, expectations and self-images play a significant role in the vicious circle of poverty.If you still think that //Ahesun, Eliab, and Tsab are just unfortunate single cases, consult the statistics accumulated by the campaigners for a scheme of a Basic Income Grant.ELCRN’s Desk for Social Development has found out that Namibia’s income distribution shows an exceedingly huge number of people living off less than N$10 a month.Their number is so large that it threatens to jeopardize all other efforts towards a dynamic economy, towards viable national health and a society worth living in.This situation will not change by continuing the current mode of development work, nor is it to be radically changed through increases in social pensions.However, the situation can be expected to change if a limited degree of income security is generated by a basic income grant of N$100 per month for every citizen.Alleviating a situation of having basically no income at all is the prerequisite for solving many poverty related problems, including AIDS.In contradistinction to earlier measures of improving the situation of “the poor”, the basic income grant is suggested to be rights-based and not means-tested because a very high proportion of the very poor have been largely excluded due to a lack of access to earlier measures.In other words, in order to benefit from mainstream development activities, you need to reach a certain threshold, which at the moment the large number of very poor cannot access.Returning from the statistics to the real faces of our settlement in the remote north of the country, we may ask what the consequences of the minimum basic income grant would be.A common objection aired is that N$100 a month will be spent by many on alcohol.However, a somewhat extended visit to settlements and farms is enough to find out that you can have thriving alcohol business with all its horrendous effects of violence, dependency and poor health without any cash whatsoever.A common pattern is for people without cash to collect the raw products needed for distilling alcohol.Commonly, it is then people from outside the group, who are not tied in with kin relations of solidarity and who can accumulate wealth, who buy up these raw products, distil liquor and resell it for a high price to those who provided the raw fruits.No cash at all is needed in these transactions because commonly again it is a system that works on continual indebtedness.Some people without cash – like many people with cash – want to drink alcohol.Since they have no money, they promise to “pay” by collecting fruits which the entrepreneur can then “buy” up cheaply as a compensation for the liquor they have previously given out, transform the cheap raw materials into more alcohol, drawing in more people into the vicious cycle of dependency and exploitation.This is a devilish system indeed but it needs no cash at all.In fact one could argue that the lack of cash facilitates its emergence and makes it even more difficult to break out.Another possible argument is that cash “handouts” will destroy a functioning non-commercial sector of society.Maybe a few decades ago this argument would in fact have had some power in some parts of the country where “San” and others were able to provide goods such as red wood powder, forged knives and arrow heads, animal skins and such like in exchange for other locally produced goods.But commercial products have largely replaced the goods that these people had to offer and with restricted access to land and its resources, they themselves now need cash to buy what in the past they may have been able to get through barter exchange.Often they are paying exploitative prices to those who have come to dominate access to land, to transport and to retail channels.Work relations on a farm are increasingly restricted to a worker, minus his (mostly) extended family, and to the actual employment period, minus any further rights, for instance rights of residence for laid off or pensioned workers.The people I spoke to do not consider payments like the pensions to be contractual in the sense that you are being paid out what you have been paying in during your active time as a worker.It has been put to me in the following way: The government has taken our land and its resources, they use it for their good and continue to demand that we give up our traditional rights.In turn they provide us with pensions.In other words, pensions and other government services are not provided because they are part of a contract, or of tax being paid, but they are considered to be compensation for allowing the government and the people who benefit from the economic system in place to continue forging the system in a way that pays them but not others.It is very likely that a basic income grant will be considered in a similar way: Not the free gift from a benevolent ruler, but also not as a contractual provision that creates obligations in what you are supposed to do with that money.Rather it is compensatory money, not necessarily based on morality at all, but on the mere fact that a system has been created in which some people systematically and transgenerationally benefit more than others.The people at places like Mangetti-West who up to now have used the resources of that land feel that the current system is “robbing” them.Any benefit they may receive under a resettlement scheme is seen as small compared to the big loans and subsidies that allow others to take over a whole farm as private property.This leads on to the final argument, namely that the proposed basic income grant is too expensive.Surely, this depends on how one estimates the costs of v
arious developments.Millions have been granted in terms of the Affirmative Action Loan Scheme but relatively few seem to have benefitted.For the basic income grant, by contrast, the statisticians predict a general economic uplift because many income generating projects currently fail not necessarily because of bad implementation or bad management but simply because there is not sufficient purchasing power to keep these projects in business.There are other concealed costs: //Ahesun died this year, aged around 80, without ever seeing a cent of pension money.If you are cynical enough, you could say that this has saved the state some money but beware of the implications.//Ahesun’s daughter has several children fathered by different men who promised her a living, but who have died in the meantime.If she develops AIDS and her children become orphans, the costs are not only that of a personal tragedy.One of //Ahesun’s sons is unemployed, the sources of the land his father had are blocked to him but no new venues for income have opened up.He is bright and able but in terms of the national economy this is all wasted.Another of her sons has spent years in prison after he killed a man.Both were intoxicated when the man, an outsider, made advances on //Ahesun’s daughter in-law, exploiting his position as an owner of cash.All these things could have happened in any case, but extreme poverty and marginalization have played a role in the fact that they have happened this way.And //Ahesun herself? How do you count the “value” of an old woman, almost blind at the end of her life, for the national wealth? If you know what difference a dedicated mother and grandmother like her can make to a whole circle of people, count again.Just because there are many people living in Namibia, in terms of the country’s fragile ecology or its demographic growth, this does not mean that the country can easily “spare” people like her and the social network that relies on them.Does that mean then that there is no alternative to the basic income grant? Of course there are alternatives, but it is important to spell out clearly what they are.A combination of a number of measures may well be a good alternative: – The effective abolition of resentment and prejudices against groups such as the “San”, combined with the recognition that agriculture and livestock herding are not the only legitimate reasons for holding rights in land and that in some places they may not even be the most sustainable ways to make a living off the land.- The realization that culture is not restricted to folk dances and songs, that it is not something you “have” but something that happens to you when you encounter or clash with people who develop different strategies based on different situations.- The realization that “equal treatment” can in some contexts produce very unequal results, the acceptance that there can be other, more participatory forms of political representation and decision making than the ones currently demanded by the government and non-governmental organizations alike.Realizing this bundle of measures, and probably some more not mentioned, would indeed lead to a viable alternative.Many people, including myself, have been campaigning for such measures over the last 15 years but our campaign has been largely in vain.The development of a basic income grant scheme, therefore, may provide a new alternative that is worthwhile to pursue.* The author, Thomas Widlok, is an anthropological researcher currently at the University of Heidelberg in Germany who has done a total of more than three years of field research in Namibia between 1990 and 2005.He is author of the book “Living on Mangetti” (Oxford University Press 1999) and his email is Thomas.Widlok@urz.uni-heidelberg.de.It is the kind of place where people do not have work.There are no regular working hours that make them get up at a certain time, only the tasks that they set themselves for the day.Then, suddenly, there is continual hooting of a rapidly approaching vehicle, two vehicles in fact.They stop right in front of your tent.Armed men with machine guns and pistols alight.They do not wear regular uniforms but they look very determined.If you are a local resident you will have guessed what this is all about: the monthly Old Age Pension money has arrived.The locals are flocking to the scene because they have already waited for at least two weeks, listening to the radio to hear when the pension monies will be delivered at this remote distribution point.A portable generator is switched on, the back of a vehicle opens and a computer keyboard and a screen emerge.The locals line up and have their pension cards ready.These are inserted into the machine that automatically produces N$300 for the pensioner, or N$600 if he or she was not paid the previous month.There is also a fingerprint recognition device; this is high-tech in the bush.And it works, at least as far as the distribution of the money is concerned.No counting and handling of money is necessary, no manipulation is possible.As soon as one container is finished, a new sealed box is docked onto the computer and continues to spit out three red notes for each pensioner.The technology works, but communication is another matter.As always, there are people who want to find out about their pension applications, or they hold old identity cards and birth certificates in their hands and want to find out when it is their turn to receive a pension because they cannot read and do not know their birth date – or what some civil servant has been decided to be their birth date.And this is where the problem of access begins.The men paying out the pensions are not the ones who take applications or who comment on them.They tell people they have to go to see the social workers in Tsumeb.But if the people manage to get a lift to that office (some 100km away), they are often sent straight on to the local office of the Ministry of Home Affairs because applications for pensions are only accepted if all papers are correct, and frequently they are not.If your birth certificate says you are 74 but the ID-card says you are only 61 they will not even accept your application for pension because the papers do not agree.The local office of the Ministry of Home Affairs will send the papers to Windhoek but usually the changes are not granted and as a result old age people are left without an old age pension.In other cases, the office may ask for copies of birth certificates certified by the local police or they may ask the person to come back another time .And in any case, they demand N$50 for any new ID and each person has to collect them in person.The bureaucratic and monetary hurdles are insurmountable for the cashless people from our rural settlement.The same applies when an old person is in fact much older than the ID indicates; in some cases his or her child may already receive an old age pension but they do not.I have taken very old people to the local doctor to have their age estimated.That worked in the past but now the old people are told they need to go to Windhoek or Oshakati to have an x-ray done, which amounts to saying, “forget it”.Or as a civil servant at the Ministry of Home Affairs has put it: “These people will always suffer”.Over the last five years, things have not changed.Except that some of the old people have died in the meantime.The technical facilities for providing people with pensions even in the remote parts of the country are there, but only if you have sufficient means to access your entitlements.This applies not only to old age people but also to many others who are excluded from access to services that are – in principle – available but in practice inaccessible.No income often means no access.This article is about people who are excluded from accessing benefits that are, in principle, meant to be for them and about the implication this has for the Namibian society at large.Take old //Ahesun for example.In 2000, the local doctor estimated her age to be well over 70.She was always one of the people standing stunned at the side when the pension money was distributed.The payment of pensio
n money is a major event in her community because it exceeds any payday at the end of the month in terms of cash inflow since many farmers and corporations like NDC have laid off more and more workers over the past 15 years.Pensions are thus often the only reliable cash income, not only for individual pensioners but also for the community at large.And they trigger what may be called a whole developmental cycle.It takes the armored vehicles with the armed guards less than an hour to do their business and then they drive on to the next point.Less than an hour later another car arrives, a somewhat battered bakkie with a Rundu number plate.It is filled with huge bags of second-hand clothes.The same crowd that was there when the pension was paid out, reassembles to inspect the goods of the trader and to start spending the money.Firstly, practical problems emerge because three hundred dollars in three big notes are difficult to split.The trader has simple prices: N$20 for underwear, N$50 for shirts and so on.Everyone thinks these are outrageous prices but there is no other trader in sight, there is hardly transport to go anywhere and a lift costs you at least the price of a shirt.If you make it to Tsintsabis or Tsumeb with your pension money chances are unfortunately good that you are ripped off there, as well.After the second-hand clothes dealer has moved on to the next pay-point, the local farm shop opens.It is not only the pensioners who have been flocking to this place but people of all ages who expect a share of the goods that can be bought with that money.A local producer of liquor has also prepared herself for this day.But back to old //Ahesun.She is not drinking liquor, she never has.She has successfully brought up four children.One son lives further north, having a field of mahangu but is without cash income.One son lives further south, having a job with a farmer with the meagre income of N$400 every month.Two other children who already have children themselves live here but have no income at all.In other words //Ahesun is pretty much cut off from any income.In the past, she survived by collecting wild foodstuffs.But this source has been diminishing since more and more land has been taken away by livestock owners, agriculturalists and absentee “owners” who have fenced in new farms on what used to be communal land while living on paid jobs in the civil service or in business.Moreover, the excellent skills she had learned when coping with the variability of wild natural resources do not help her to understand when and how drought relief and other sources can be accessed.Some argue that the availability of drought relief follows political seasons more than actual droughts but to most people it is simply puzzling when and why some settlements attract overseas donors, government sources or non-governmental support while others do not.All that they feel, very crudely, is that they lack the political resources to access the material resources that are supposed to assist the poor landless people of Namibia.//Ahesun is particularly vulnerable not because she is now old and frail.Her family shares with her whatever they have, the kin-based solidarity is largely intact.But her kin and her neighbours have very little to share because they, too, are excluded.It is a subtle exclusion because it is realized under the cover of inclusionism.Years ago when people of //Ahesun’s community wanted to claim some of their land, they were told that they could apply for it just like anyone else but that there would be no way that they would receive group rights for their original land.The Mangetti-West farms will soon cease to be an NDC enterprise.Many people want that land on which the “San” currently live.It seems unlikely that the current occupants and traditional owners will benefit from the resettlement plans.The crux of the matter is that the threshold for applying for land is already too high and that it in fact excludes them.Take Eliab and Tsab, close relatives of //Ahesun at another settlement.Both have been in exile with Swapo and they can still proudly present their membership cards.They wanted to return to their original land instead of joining a development brigade.Eliab has been hanging on for 15 years now.He has seen visits of the Minister of Lands; he has been given a shovel to clear land and recently he has even been given wire to fence in a piece of land after he and his relatives had already been fenced out by businessman who excludes him and his kin from using the water.Access to water is a clear-cut right but when living in a remote part of the country without the necessary resources to even file a complaint such rights can become ineffective.The dilemma of being too weak to receive the benefits meant to help the poor is not limited to the question of rights to land, water, and secure residence but extends virtually to all parts of life.Clinics, in principle, should not refuse someone who has not even got the N$4 you usually pay.But it happens they are refused because it is not believed that they do not have those few dollars it takes.It happens regularly enough for people not even attempting to take the long trip to a clinic, unless a visiting researcher happens to be there who can provide a free lift and who can exert the moral authority to make clinic staff accept sick people without any payment.Or take school uniforms, something that was originally invented to create unity and equality amongst learners but which now creates a rigid divide between those who can afford the uniforms and others who cannot.Not having “proper clothes” is a frequent means of exclusion, also among adults.Just as with the money asked by clinics, it gains its own momentum of exclusion.The experience of having been excluded on the grounds of “being dirty” or “not properly dressed” discourages people to try again next time.Cultural stereotypes, expectations and self-images play a significant role in the vicious circle of poverty.If you still think that //Ahesun, Eliab, and Tsab are just unfortunate single cases, consult the statistics accumulated by the campaigners for a scheme of a Basic Income Grant.ELCRN’s Desk for Social Development has found out that Namibia’s income distribution shows an exceedingly huge number of people living off less than N$10 a month.Their number is so large that it threatens to jeopardize all other efforts towards a dynamic economy, towards viable national health and a society worth living in.This situation will not change by continuing the current mode of development work, nor is it to be radically changed through increases in social pensions.However, the situation can be expected to change if a limited degree of income security is generated by a basic income grant of N$100 per month for every citizen.Alleviating a situation of having basically no income at all is the prerequisite for solving many poverty related problems, including AIDS.In contradistinction to earlier measures of improving the situation of “the poor”, the basic income grant is suggested to be rights-based and not means-tested because a very high proportion of the very poor have been largely excluded due to a lack of access to earlier measures.In other words, in order to benefit from mainstream development activities, you need to reach a certain threshold, which at the moment the large number of very poor cannot access.Returning from the statistics to the real faces of our settlement in the remote north of the country, we may ask what the consequences of the minimum basic income grant would be.A common objection aired is that N$100 a month will be spent by many on alcohol.However, a somewhat extended visit to settlements and farms is enough to find out that you can have thriving alcohol business with all its horrendous effects of violence, dependency and poor health without any cash whatsoever.A common pattern is for people without cash to collect the raw products needed for distilling alcohol.Commonly, it is then people from outside the group, who are not tied in with kin relations of solidarity and who can accumulate wealth, who buy up these raw products, distil li
quor and resell it for a high price to those who provided the raw fruits.No cash at all is needed in these transactions because commonly again it is a system that works on continual indebtedness.Some people without cash – like many people with cash – want to drink alcohol.Since they have no money, they promise to “pay” by collecting fruits which the entrepreneur can then “buy” up cheaply as a compensation for the liquor they have previously given out, transform the cheap raw materials into more alcohol, drawing in more people into the vicious cycle of dependency and exploitation.This is a devilish system indeed but it needs no cash at all.In fact one could argue that the lack of cash facilitates its emergence and makes it even more difficult to break out.Another possible argument is that cash “handouts” will destroy a functioning non-commercial sector of society.Maybe a few decades ago this argument would in fact have had some power in some parts of the country where “San” and others were able to provide goods such as red wood powder, forged knives and arrow heads, animal skins and such like in exchange for other locally produced goods.But commercial products have largely replaced the goods that these people had to offer and with restricted access to land and its resources, they themselves now need cash to buy what in the past they may have been able to get through barter exchange.Often they are paying exploitative prices to those who have come to dominate access to land, to transport and to retail channels.Work relations on a farm are increasingly restricted to a worker, minus his (mostly) extended family, and to the actual employment period, minus any further rights, for instance rights of residence for laid off or pensioned workers.The people I spoke to do not consider payments like the pensions to be contractual in the sense that you are being paid out what you have been paying in during your active time as a worker.It has been put to me in the following way: The government has taken our land and its resources, they use it for their good and continue to demand that we give up our traditional rights.In turn they provide us with pensions.In other words, pensions and other government services are not provided because they are part of a contract, or of tax being paid, but they are considered to be compensation for allowing the government and the people who benefit from the economic system in place to continue forging the system in a way that pays them but not others.It is very likely that a basic income grant will be considered in a similar way: Not the free gift from a benevolent ruler, but also not as a contractual provision that creates obligations in what you are supposed to do with that money.Rather it is compensatory money, not necessarily based on morality at all, but on the mere fact that a system has been created in which some people systematically and transgenerationally benefit more than others.The people at places like Mangetti-West who up to now have used the resources of that land feel that the current system is “robbing” them.Any benefit they may receive under a resettlement scheme is seen as small compared to the big loans and subsidies that allow others to take over a whole farm as private property.This leads on to the final argument, namely that the proposed basic income grant is too expensive.Surely, this depends on how one estimates the costs of various developments.Millions have been granted in terms of the Affirmative Action Loan Scheme but relatively few seem to have benefitted.For the basic income grant, by contrast, the statisticians predict a general economic uplift because many income generating projects currently fail not necessarily because of bad implementation or bad management but simply because there is not sufficient purchasing power to keep these projects in business.There are other concealed costs: //Ahesun died this year, aged around 80, without ever seeing a cent of pension money.If you are cynical enough, you could say that this has saved the state some money but beware of the implications.//Ahesun’s daughter has several children fathered by different men who promised her a living, but who have died in the meantime.If she develops AIDS and her children become orphans, the costs are not only that of a personal tragedy.One of //Ahesun’s sons is unemployed, the sources of the land his father had are blocked to him but no new venues for income have opened up.He is bright and able but in terms of the national economy this is all wasted.Another of her sons has spent years in prison after he killed a man.Both were intoxicated when the man, an outsider, made advances on //Ahesun’s daughter in-law, exploiting his position as an owner of cash.All these things could have happened in any case, but extreme poverty and marginalization have played a role in the fact that they have happened this way.And //Ahesun herself? How do you count the “value” of an old woman, almost blind at the end of her life, for the national wealth? If you know what difference a dedicated mother and grandmother like her can make to a whole circle of people, count again.Just because there are many people living in Namibia, in terms of the country’s fragile ecology or its demographic growth, this does not mean that the country can easily “spare” people like her and the social network that relies on them.Does that mean then that there is no alternative to the basic income grant? Of course there are alternatives, but it is important to spell out clearly what they are.A combination of a number of measures may well be a good alternative: – The effective abolition of resentment and prejudices against groups such as the “San”, combined with the recognition that agriculture and livestock herding are not the only legitimate reasons for holding rights in land and that in some places they may not even be the most sustainable ways to make a living off the land.- The realization that culture is not restricted to folk dances and songs, that it is not something you “have” but something that happens to you when you encounter or clash with people who develop different strategies based on different situations.- The realization that “equal treatment” can in some contexts produce very unequal results, the acceptance that there can be other, more participatory forms of political representation and decision making than the ones currently demanded by the government and non-governmental organizations alike.Realizing this bundle of measures, and probably some more not mentioned, would indeed lead to a viable alternative.Many people, including myself, have been campaigning for such measures over the last 15 years but our campaign has been largely in vain.The development of a basic income grant scheme, therefore, may provide a new alternative that is worthwhile to pursue.* The author, Thomas Widlok, is an anthropological researcher currently at the University of Heidelberg in Germany who has done a total of more than three years of field research in Namibia between 1990 and 2005.He is author of the book “Living on Mangetti” (Oxford University Press 1999) and his email is Thomas.Widlok@urz.uni-heidelberg.de.
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