Temperatures rise over land reform

IT is a travesty of justice that one family can own vast tracts of land in Namibia while many rural people are squeezed into small patches of land, Prime Minister Nahas Angula said in Parliament yesterday.

A debate on land reform became heated, and the ‘greed’ of previously advantaged Namibians was blamed for soaring farm prices.’The farm Erindi south of Otjiwarongo is a 70 000-hectare conservancy with lots of wild animals, but no people there. It is owned by one foreign absentee landlord,’ Prime Minister Angula said.’Erindi is a world of its own, actually a country, an area as big as the Ondonga area. I was shocked when I drove over Erindi recently,’ he said.He said the least that the Joubert family who owns Erindo could do was to sell 40 per cent of its value as shares to other Namibians so they could share the wealth.The Prime Minister was the first contributor to a motion tabled by Kaveri Kavari of CoD yesterday, urging that the prices of farms and plots in towns should be investigated and regulated to make them affordable for all Namibians.Kavari said she had investigated some farm prices in the Oshikoto Region and found that they had shot up from N$400 per hectare to N$1 775 this January. Another farm in Omaheke was sold two months ago at N$1 236 per hectare, at a total price N$7,2 million, she said. ‘Some people acquire farms not for production but as a status symbol, which increases demand for farms due to artificial and genuine demand for land. Government should intervene,’ Kavari said.’Demand and supply cannot determine land prices anymore otherwise we come to a point where farmers must be bailed out because they cannot afford to pay their loans anymore or they must even be written off.’Another practice that should be stopped, according to the CoD politician, is the selling of farming rights to foreigners who could thus ‘acquire land without legal interference’.’This defeats the purpose of land reform,’ Kavari said. The Prime Minister added that many white farmers declared themselves bankrupt so their farms could be auctioned off, and farms are also auctioned off when their owners died, driving prices up. A third ‘abuse of Government’s goodwill’, as Angula put it, was the formation of close corporations (CCs) to own farms. If the owner of a farm is a CC, the land could be sold ‘as if it was a company’, he said. ‘I hope Government puts its foot down, otherwise all land in Namibia will be sold to foreigners, since many Namibians connive with foreigners and buy land for them,’ he charged.Veterans’ Affairs Minister Ngarikutuke Tjiriange warned of a ‘revolution’ if speculation with land prices is not curtailed.