Feature Namibia
The shacks of Katatura, the place where black people don’t want to live, yet do
True to the chief ’s words, on Easter
Monday we travelled from Windhoek to Gobabis, 200 km east, on the border with Botswana. And on both sides of the road, the fences went on unbroken for the whole 200 km – all private property in the hands of a few white Namibians, many of whom have multiple farms scattered all over the place. And wait for this: While I was in Na-
uranium that comes to the country is minimal. Most goes to the foreigners who hold shares in the multinationals.”
buyer’ basis, a format that didn’t work in Zimbabwe and doesn’t work in Namibia either. As such, “there is considerable pent- up demand,” as the UNDP study discov- ered, “among black Namibians who cannot afford to buy a large farm, but who desire to have land of about 1,000 hectares on which to keep cattle. Such farms are [how- ever] scarce on commercial farmland, as there is a law against subdivision of such farmland. Tat law was passed in the last years before independence and is seen by those desiring small farms as an attempt to keep black people out of commercial farm- ing.”
Tat law notwithstanding, land reform
in Namibia post-independence has been driven more by the wish for black empow- erment than by concerns about economic inequality. For example, “the largest pro- portion of land for communal resettlement in the second half of the 1990s (21,202 hec- tares) is on farms donated to the state by Carl List, one of the largest landowners”. In a sense, Namibia has a worse land
ownership system than Zimbabwe (before the land reform of 2000). As a result, ac- cording to one SWAPO intellectual giant, the Namibian government “rules only over the tarred roads and the air in the country”.
44 | June 2011 New African “The share of the revenue from diamonds and
mibia, one deputy minister in the SWAPO government, Kilus Nguvauva (the deputy minister for fisheries and marine resources), who tried to go into one of these private properties (a farm owned by a white man) to address a labour dispute between his constituents and their white farmer boss, and investigate their working conditions, had been taken to court by the white farmer for “trespassing” on private property! Te case was still in court at the time I left Windhoek in early April. In all this, the most amazing thing is
And he was not joking. “If you turn left or right off the tarred
roads,” the SWAPO man explained, a bit sadly, “you get private fences, miles and miles and miles of them, shutting out gov- ernment control of the land. It is all private property and the government dares not trespass on private property.” “What is more,” the SWAPO man
continued, “Chapter 3 of the Namibian Constitution, which was inserted at the request of the imperial powers, the Gang of Five (the so-called Contact Group made up of the UK, USA, Canada, Germany and France that helped in the independ- ence negotiations), prevents the SWAPO government from doing anything radical about the land.” When I asked him “why”, the SWAPO
man said: “It is because every article and clause under Chapter 3 is not amendable. We can’t amend anything under Chapter 3. So, we have to live with the silly situation where over 90% of the land in this huge country is in the hands of a few thousand white Namibians. Meanwhile, our own people have no land. I am a chief myself, and I have no land. Imagine, a chief who has no land in his own district, in his own country?”
that the Namibian government seriously wants its people and Africa to believe that it cannot change even a “t” or “i” in Chapter 3 of the national constitution, when in fact constitutions are written by human beings and, everywhere, are routinely changed by human beings as and when it becomes necessary. In other words, if the government can-
not amend Chapter 3, what else can Na- mibians do? Continue to throw their hands in the air (which, thankfully, the SWAPO government controls) as a few white Na- mibians continue to own all the fences along the roads while the majority black population remain hewers of wood and drawers of water – in their own country? All said and done, it is in the interest of
the descendants of the former colonisers to meet the natives half-way, and resolve the land issue amicably now rather than leave it to explode later. For, even if the current generation of native Namibians in government continues to be seduced by the sophistry masquerading as rationality and economic/political pragmatism, nobody can guarantee that the next generation, or even two generations down the road, will continue the current policy. A time will come when the time-bomb will explode, as it did in Zimbabwe!
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