Leaden-footed bureaucracy, rather than commercial farmers dragging their heels, is the main reason why it would take decades before black Namibian farmers would own half of commercial farm land, the Institute for Public Policy Research Institute (IPPR) in Windhoek said this week.
President Sam Nujoma has in recent weeks warned ”the arrogant white farmers” that his government would brook no opposition in reforming Namibia’s land situation. With his attack on critics of Zimbabwe’s controversial land reform programme at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, one would be forgiven for thinking that Namibia was heading the same way as Zimbabwe.
Not necessarily true, said the IPPR in its Business Barometer report — the fiery rhetoric by Nujoma might be more a smokescreen for administrative inefficiency. In 12 years of land reform, the government has managed to reallocate only 7,4% of commercial farm land, at which rate it would take 60 years before black farmers own half of commercial farms.
With an annual R20-million allocated to buying up commercial farms since 1996 on a willing-seller, willing-buyer principle, the Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation has underspent its budget by as much as two-thirds, the IPPR pointed out.
In terms of local legislation, farmers wishing to sell their land first have to offer it to the government for resettlement purposes. But the IPPR found that in 1999 the state bought only four of 142 farms offered for sale. In 2000 this increased slightly as the state bought 15 of 125 farms offered (12%), with this doubling to 24% last year. As of August 2002, the state has bought only 118 farms at a cost of R105,4-million — which places a question mark behind politicians’ insistence that is was a ”burning issue”.
Nujoma and his ministers have been complaining loudly that white farmers want too much for their land (prices average between R250 and R350 a hectare) and at the recent South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) congress they decided the state should set R100-million aside to buy more farms to resettle landless people.
Swapo’s congress also decided that all absentee landowners would have their farms expropriated. But this amounts to only 192 farms, or some 1 268 911 hectares — by no means all of the estimated 350 foreign-owned farms, the balance of which have been developed into high-yield tourist attractions.
The IPPR pointed out that this decision was a repetition of a 1991 Land Conference resolution to bar foreigners from owning productive Namibian farms. ”We find it hard to understand why it has taken 12 years to carry out this resolution if land is really such a pressing issue,” the IPPR’s Robin Sherbourne wrote.
As for the intention to allocate R100-million to buying up more farms, this was hard to reconcile with the government’s need to curb the growing budget deficit.
Furthermore, the political reality is that the bulk of Swapo’s support base is made up of the Oshiwambo- speaking ethnic groups from northern Namibia who never lost any land to the colonial process. Instead, the bulk of their tribal lands lie within southern Angola, which they abandoned in the face of Portuguese occupation to flee south to seek the protection of the German colonial forces.
It has been the Herero and Nama people from the central and southern parts of Namibia who lost all their land in the wake of the Herero and Nama rebellions of 1904 to 1907. An estimated two-thirds of both tribes were wiped out and the survivors were herded into largely infertile ”reservations” as a labour pool for the German colonial farmers.
With Namibia’s politics dominated by the ethnic vote, the Herero find themselves locked into the dying embrace of a small opposition party, the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, which draws heavy support (and financing) from the white farming community.
Although the alliance garnered about 40% of the vote in 1989’s independence elections, the recent emergence of the Swapo dissident party, the Congress of Democrats, has seen its support drop by more than 50% to only eight seats in Parliament.
The colonial German farmers, in turn, had all their farms expropriated after World War I, but many have made a comeback and are Namibia’s most successful farming community. Moreover, they make up the bulk of the high-growth tourism businesses, as more and more farmers found that lucrative exchange rates made it easier to make a living off tourism.
With many of them also bearers of German passports, there is a prohibitive agreement that would ruin Namibia financially, if it were to seize their property. In terms of the Protection of Investment Agreement signed in 1993 with the German government, Namibia would have to compensate every German farmer, at market value and in hard currency, payable in Germany, for any assets so seized from them.
But there is a real need for land reform — in communal land, which accounts for the bulk of Namibia’s cattle herds and 60% of the population. Three years ago, about 1 000 communal farmers marched on State House to demand the halting of the so-called Communal Land Reform Bill, which sought to simply entrench the hold that traditional chiefs have over the allocation of land.
Nujoma and his party made sympathetic noises — but taking a note from the colonials’ book, saw their hold over traditional chiefs, who are paid a salary by the state, as part of their extended party patronage system. Instead, the communal farmers’ able secretary general Gabes Shihepo suddenly found himself elevated into Cabinet as Deputy Minister of Information and Broadcasting — and not a peep has been heard from him since.
Add to this that nearly every Namibian minister has now availed themselves of cheap Agriculture Bank loans to buy farms for themselves (Nujoma himself owns several in the Otavi district), one is left the impression that Namibia’s land reform programme will only benefit the privileged landless.