Omatjete Is Under Siege: Drought, Elephants!

IT was in 2004 when I last went through Ozondati village en route to Uis and Henties Bay. At the time I passed as a pseudo entrepreneur and looked more at natural sites that could attract tourists as well as potential business settings for industrial and liquid petroleum gases of my company NAMOX.

At the time places along the road such as Omatjete, Okaumbaaha, Ozondati and others were mere potential sites for business outlets and not much else.This time around I went for the funeral of my longtime friend’s grandmother at the village of Ozondati, and looked at life through the prism of a commercial farmer. The trip from Omaheke was long and I arrived in Ozondati at two in the morning. I woke up at 07h15 and I could not believe my eyes. The area was barren and left the impression of the roadside between Usakos and Arandis during the Namibian winter. The funeral took place at a different village about 25 km away. Along the way we saw some cattle and goats with different physical conditions. My friend Vekuii Rukoro, in whose car we travelled to the funeral, shared in his soft-spoken fashion his childhood memories and experiences: how they tended animals in this forest and how the forest has now changed for the worse. We came to a river and he said that when it had rained the river in question used to interfere with the normal life of the farmers. I took a look at both sides of the river and it looked like one endless stroke of sand with no sign of water. It was a depressing sight indeed.After the funeral I spent another night there. During the evening the farmers and residents of Omatjete shared their experiences from the area. Many concurred that drought was not unusual to Omatjete and many farmers had developed some coping mechanisms. The younger and able-bodied residents have taken to cities, commercial farms and towns throughout Namibia in search of employment and those who could afford to have bought farms and moved their whole families and relatives to these places. There was an element of stability to the extent possible. But the biggest challenge of the area now is the rampant elephants. There was not one village that has not fallen victim of these huge animals. They would arrive mostly at night and would bring the entire village to a virtual standstill. Dams would be destroyed, water pipes deformed and homesteads levelled to the ground. The latest coping mechanism was for residents to pool resources and ferry large stones from nearby hills in order to line them up around homesteads in broad heaps, so that the elephants would not get close to the houses.This situation was close to a virtual boiling point. During the night I was awoken by an urgently arriving vehicle and overheard a conversation between two brothers. The elephants were roaming in their village and the one who was at the homestead, having run out of bullets, drove hastily to the village where we were to ask his brother for some backup. On my way back I stopped at a shop in another village. Two men exchanged greetings. One of them said: ‘Mbuae muetupatere onjama jondjou re?’ I quickly moved on, not to leave the impression that I heard anything. Perhaps it is time for serious intervention in the lives of the Omatjete residents to ameliorate their plight from drought and from the threat of elephants.