‘We will invade resettlement farms’ Maltahöhe residents say they have had enough Threats to invade resettlement farms have followed on descriptions of the land reform programme as corrupt and unfair. Tension is growing in the Hardap Region as landless residents of Maltahöhe threaten to invade the resettlement farms allocated to people from other regions around the town.The residents have described the resettlement programme “unfairly implemented and corrupt to its core”.
These threats emerged at the land consultative meeting recently held by the working group of the Namibian Non-Governmental Organisation Forum (Nangof) at Maltahöhe.
The consultations are being held in various regions across the country, excluding the areas north of the red line, with financial assistance from the Friedrich Erbert Stiftung. They are led by land activists Uhuru Dempers and Sima Luipert.
The meetings are in preparation for the proposed second national land conference envisaged for November 2016.
Maltahöhe is one of the many villages and settlements in southern Namibia where a host of burning land issues were discussed as part of Nangof’sregional consultations.
The land issue has become more emotive of late. The perception coming through at Maltahöhe is that the local inhabitants of Hardap are apparently not benefitting from the resettlement process that has been undertaken on the many farms that government has bought there over the years.
Nangof has expressed its concern that the November land conference has been announced with far too little notice and without proper consultations.
“Why has this most important conference been announced at such short notice without any stakeholder consultations? Is this going to be yet another talk show where the lands ministry will evaluate itself? How do you organise such a major conference within one month?” Nangof queried in a media release.
The organisation further alleges that the reasons given by government on the slow pace of land reform are at best misleading.
The government claims that it is not offered enough land of good quality and that white farmers do not want to sell their farms.
According to Nangof, research conducted by independent academics shows that white landowners sold almost twice as much land through the Affirmative Action Loan Scheme than to government since independence.
Further allegations emerged that government is resettling too many beneficiaries on small parcels of environmentally sensitive land, making it prone to overgrazing and further desertification.
Thomas Skrywer, a Maltahöhe resident alleged that government is continuing the creation of homelands, albeit with people of different ethnic groups.
“The fact remains that the land on which beneficiaries is resettled does not have the carrying capacity for so many farmers, neither does it have adequate water infrastructure. This will make the land completely unproductive in the long run. It looks like the government is creating pools of “Bantustan-like reserves”, he claimed.
Paul Gariseb, also a resident and participant at the consultative meeting explained that the problem with resettlement is not so much that people from other regions are resettled, but that they are resettled at the expense of local landless people who are direct descendants of genocide and colonial land dispossession.
“We were willing to compromise on the 1991 resolution related to ancestral land claims, and gave government the benefit of the doubt believing that it would act in good faith. We are however seeing that government is betraying that trust”, an emotional Gariseb stated.
He said that the inhabitants have eventually settled along corridors because they have no other alternative.
“We are now forced to live along corridors with our livestock while strangers have taken over our ancestral land,” he added.
“What does the word resettlement actually mean?” asked one landless resident who claims that he applied numerous times for resettlement. He added that government is resettling people who were never “unsettled to begin with”.
Like the residents of Hoachanas, Maltahöhe residents resolved to send a delegation to the land conference to hand in a petition with their demands to government.
FRED GOEIEMAN