Zimbabwe has sent six land ”experts” to Namibia in a move that could accelerate a planned expropriation of white-owned farms.
The Zimbabwean land evaluators arrived in Windhoek this week to advise officials on how to carry out land redistribution, the newspaper The Namibian, reported on Thursday.
Ndali-Che Kamati, the Namibian ambassador to Harare, said it was hoped that President Robert Mugabe’s regime would be able to help the government of Sam Nujoma.
”We just started implementing our land reform and in that regard we have a lot to learn from the Zimbabwean experience,” Kamati told Zimbabwe’s government-controlled daily The Herald.
Some 4 000 white farmers own about half of Namibia’s arable land. Since the land reform began in 1990, 118 farms have been purchased by the government and 37 100 people have been resettled.
In Zimbabwe the land seizures have been violent, with Mugabe supporters grabbing more than 90% of previously white-owned farms as well as land owned by some black farmers. The country’s agricultural output has decreased by so much it has been forced to rely on international food aid for three years.
Namibia’s President Nujoma has copied many of Mugabe’s policies, including tirades against gay people, sending troops to Congo’s war, building a lavish palace and altering the constitution to extend his time in power.
Although he recently said he would not seek a fourth term in office, it is believed he intends to speed up land redistribution to black Namibians to assure that his Swapo party wins the next election. The Zimbabwean land specialists will suggest how to determine the compensation to be offered for developments on the commercial farms.
Zimbabwe has refused to pay compensation for land it has seized from white farmers, on the grounds that the land was originally stolen from the African people. Mugabe said his government would only pay compensation for improvements such as buildings and wells, but in practice this has not been done.
The arrival of the Zimbabweans has prompted speculation that the Namibian government may seize land. It is likely to take 40 years before half of the white-owned land is in the hands of poor black Namibians, according to the independent Institute for Public Policy Research.
A study by the institute said the government’s land policies had led to only 1% of commercial land being redistributed a year. This pace meant the issue was ”unlikely to be resolved soon” and would ”continue to hold back national economic development by aggravating racial tension and creating uncertainty”.
The Namibian government recently said it would be expropriating land for resettlement purposes. While welcoming efforts to speed up such land reform, the study called for clear targets. ”Is 50% of total commercial farmland sufficient within a generation or should it be 75% within 10 years? What is a politically acceptable racial balance?” it asked.
”Do black Namibians really want to own what are after all often rather bleak and unproductive tracts of land?”
The government’s approach to date seemed sensible: to expropriate unproductive land held by foreigners and absentee landlords, the institute said. But ”by widening the criteria to include just about anyone, [it] is clearly counterproductive.” – Guardian Unlimited Â