OVAHERERO paramount chief Vekuii Rukoro yesterday apologised for saying last August that a third force was sowing disunity amongst Hereros and for labelling the current government an “Ovambo government”.
Rukoro said the “Ovambo government is putting their finger in the Hereros’ backside”, after urban development minister Sophia Shaningwa granted permission to the Maharero Royal House to commemorate Red Flag day at the Kommando plot at Okahandja.
The Ovaherero Traditional Authority had purchased one of the plots close to where the Maharero Royal House commemoration was held.
Yesterday Rukoro told the media at Kommando number two, in Windhoek’s Katutura, that he was apologising upon request of President Hage Geingob over the remarks published in a weekly newspaper at the time.
“I therefore wish to hereby unreservedly withdraw the aforesaid offending statements and equally apologise to the Namibian public in this regard,” he said. “I have to defer to the superiority of sources of intelligence of the President. If he says there is no third force there is none and I have to withdraw.”
Rukoro said he made the statements because of, so he alleges, harassment of Ovaherero people at the hands of government officials and that he was “defending the rights and interest of my people against aforesaid onslaught”.
“I overreacted and used words and phrases which on mature reflection are clearly not appropriate,” he said. At the same occasion, Rukoro called on government to improve the resettlement programme. According to Rukoro, one has to either be lucky or satisfy some other criteria the rest of Namibia was not aware in order to qualify for land, and he stated that the allocation of land appeared to be done in dark corners of the lands ministry.
Despite apologising, Rukoro insisted that ancestral land restitution demands should be heard, contending that those who said such rights do not exist were playing “ostrich politics”.
“In this country, historically, you must be playing jokes if you want to say you have no clue or idea that there was or continues to be something called ancestral land. You want to play ostrich politics,” he said.
Rukoro described two types of ancestral land. According to him, the first type was never appropriated by colonialists, such as the communal lands of the northern Namibia peoples, who were colonised and brutalised on their land.
He said the other type was the lands over which the Ovaherero and Nama were exterminated by the German colonial government and later further dispossessed by the South African apartheid regime.
“That land was lost, was dispossessed and continues to be dispossessed. Let us not pretend that the fact that Namibia has independence and freedom, all of a sudden, for some reason or another, our title and claims to our ancestral land has also disappeared. They have not disappeared and shall not disappear. We have freedom and independence, but we haven’t gotten justice and that is entwined with the economic struggle and we shall pursue it for generations to come,” he said.
