Clinton tears into Nujoma

Clinton tears into NujomaMinister’s handling of resettlement process ‘unacceptable’ Deputy lands minister Clinton Swartbooi has condemned minister Utoni Nujoma’s resettling of northern Namibians on farms in the south of the country. FRED GOEIEMAN



The deputy minister of land reform, Clinton Swartbooi, says his senior at the ministry, Utoni Nujoma, must be called to order for the manner in which he is handling the land resettlement process.

Swartbooi has accused Nujoma of resettling people from as far as the Zambezi Region in the south, and on land that had been seized by the imperial German regime, ahead of the local Nama people.

“It is unacceptable what Utoni does with resettlement. He must be called to order. I do not work for him. I work for President Hage Geingob,” he said at the Kai//Khau festival at Hoachanas on Saturday.

Swartbooi added that the priority of government resettlement programmes should be to first resettle those who had lost land.

According to him, after the Nama and OvaHerero genocide between 1904 and 1907 the colonial administration took all productive land from those tribes, leaving them with useless land.

He said that resulted in most of the productive land being taken over by German settlers.

Swartbooi said according to statistics from the land reform ministry, by 1913, 1 331 farms were owned by white settlers, which amounted to 13.4 million hectares of land.

After the implementation of the Odendaal Plan of 1963, the then 17 native reserves in the police zone were consolidated into seven ethnic homelands and purportedly the total land used by black Namibians increased from 22 million hectares to 32.7 million hectares.

The Odendaal Plan advocated for separate development for whites and blacks.

However, Swartbooi said this increase of land was not impressive as most land in the native reserves was unproductive and semi-desert.

“Eighty-seven percent of land given to the Damara under the Odendaal Plan fell in the semi-desert agro-ecological unit. The entire Nama communal areas are in semi-desert areas and at least 30% of land given to the OvaHerero was not suitable for agriculture and did not have any water,” Swartbooi said.

According to him, the communities in southern and central Namibia, such as the Nama, OvaHerero, Damara, Khoisan and Basters, predominantly led a pastoral existence.

“The scarcity and unpredictability of pastures required the communities to disperse widely over territory in small groups in order to utilise existing resources efficiently,” he said.

He added that as a result, no fixed boundaries existed between different communities although loosely defined areas of jurisdiction were recognised.

Contrary to that, the indigenous population in northern Namibia combined settled agriculture and animal husbandry.

People in the northern areas retained access to land as crop production had not been affected by the Rinderpest pandemic which forced pastoral peasants into wage labour.

He argued that the colonialists were interested in southern and central Namibia because of its mineral and marine resources, and thus dispossessed the indigenous people of their land.

According to him, that explains why there is less communal land in the southern and central areas compared to the northern parts of the country.

He said that any government that has access to statistics must correct the question of land dispossession and emphasised that it is high time the government practices restorative justice to those who lost land.

Swartbooi further added that it was utterly nonsensical to resettle someone from Zambezi in the south while ignoring the descendants of those who had lost the land.

Nujoma could not be reached for comment yesterday as he was said to be in a meeting. He did also not answer questions sent to him via SMS.

Land question

The land reform minister recently said that a total of 281 foreign nationals owned 1.4 million hectares of agricultural land in the country.

In addition, the government had between April 2015 and February 2016 acquired 36 farms to resettle 57 families at a cost of N$290 million.

Since independence the government has acquired 408 farms measuring 2.9 million hectares for resettlement purposes.