Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
“Otjombinde community garden blossoms” was the screaming headline of an article in a recent edition of one of the local English dailies.
Interestingly, the article was the second lead in that publication, a testimony to its importance, or pseudo-importance, if you will. Ordinarily, an article like this rarely finds its way into the mainstream media as a leading story.
But of what use is a garden in the rural constituency of Otjombinde, worse still in the Omaheke Region which is traditionally a livestock-rearing and production area?
Yours Truly Ideologically cannot help but think loudly, for lack of an understanding of what interest such an article holds for the Otjombinde community itself.
The same question applies to the usefulness of a garden, except for the purely obvious: that it is not a permanent solution but merely a stopgap measure to the endemic problem of unemployment, particularly among the youth.
While 90 youths have been employed, that alone and notwithstanding the dire straits of most impoverished rural environs, including Otjombinde, epitomises the country’s rural economic backwardness at best and generally.
Hence, gardening cannot be a cause for célèbre unless the garden connects meaningfully and purposefully, not to mention philosophically and ideologically, with what is supposed to be the constituency’s economic mainstay: livestock production.
Not as an end in itself, but as a means toward an end. That end is agrarian reform, given that Otjombinde, and Namibia for that matter, is an agrarian village.
Whatever is envisaged, the first stepping stone is agrarian reform. If gardening in the constituency is to have any long-term meaning other than pure political development masturbations of its prime mover(s), it must connect and feed into what has long been, and shall continue to be, the mainstay of the constituency’s subsistence economy: livestock production.
We are all aware, least of all officialdom (meaning the government, its policymakers, its political principals, and let alone farmers’ associations), of the elephant in the room regarding livestock production in this constituency, as is the case in many other rural constituencies of the country. That problem is the marketing of livestock.
Our rural areas have been rendered and relegated to backyard economies, as they are and continue to be today.
This is because prices for their livestock have been deliberately suppressed, thereby suffocating our rural economies and keeping them on the periphery of the mainstream economy, if not practically arresting and/or underdeveloping our rural areas.
Needless to say, this is a situation the government is and must have been aware of. But for reasons known only to itself, it has been shy, and at best silent on the matter, at least in helping farmers confront the problem of livestock marketing in our rural areas.
Instead, the government comes with grandiose schemes that cannot be of any help unless they become an integral part of rural agrarian reform.
That, needless to say, cannot happen without first ensuring that livestock prices improve. Thus, gardening cannot and should not be an end in itself but rather a buttress, first and foremost, to the subsistence economies in most of our rural areas.
The end being modernising these subsistence economies into the mainstream economy, if need be. “If need be” because these economies are structurally and inherently outcasts, to say the least, of the capitalist economies of our urban areas, thus essentially serving such economies instead of being progressive, integral parts of the main economy.
Our rural economies were and have never been intended to one day prosper and become stable means of sustenance for the people in these rural areas.
Yours Truly Ideologically is not even aware of any philosophical or ideological conceptualisation for these gardens, including the much-talked-about green schemes, other than ideas subjected to trial and error.
Given the necessary philosophical and ideological foundation, one would have thought such projects could serve as economic models for the transformation of rural backyard economies to spur these areas toward, for starters, the necessary agrarian egalitarian evolution, and ultimately an agrarian revolution.
This stands in contrast to the officially trumpeted Vision 2030 regarding industrialisation, begging the question: How can one industrialise Namibia — a village that she is, and practically an agrarian economy at best if not most?
Given the government’s obvious non-ideological orientation and its laissez-faire disposition, these community gardens and green schemes shall remain just what they are: politically and policy-wise fashionable.
On the face of it, they may seem beneficial, but they cannot be revolutionary unless tied to a philosophically and ideologically informed master agrarian reform plan.
It is not as if crop production is alien among traditionally livestock-producing communities such as those in Omaheke.
Coming a long way, Yours Truly Ideologically very well recalls almost every homestead having acres of gardens way back when villagers would shift from one homestead to another when rain came, preparing gardens.
Thus, there is nothing new the government can actually teach these communities about gardening, save for new methods of preparing land for crops.
These gardens, more than anything, never served as a substitute for livestock production but rather as a supplement to livestock production, which is and remains the main, if not the only, economic activity of these rural communities.
It is not as if, post-independence, traditionally livestock-producing rural communities have not been engaging in one form or another of crop production, albeit for cash more than anything, instead as a necessary and critical ingredient of and in livestock production.
Yet the produce from these farmers ends up in makeshift silos, if they can be called silos at all, eventually going to waste due to a lack of marketing avenues. A situation the reigning governor of Omaheke is very much aware of, but it seems he has been doing little about it.
Thus, the Otjombinde garden as a stand-alone is meaningless.
There is also a community garden in the Epukiro constituency under the auspices of the Ovambanderu Traditional Authority.
Otjinene is to follow suit, with the Maharero Traditional Authority reportedly having earmarked and granted acres of land for this purpose during the Prime Minister’s recent sojourn to the area on the occasion of Genocide Remembrance Day.
More than anything, such gardens may be nothing more than grandiose plans without any material meaning, simply because they have not been designed with any meaningful purpose other than grander, to make the government seem as if it is truly developmentally minded and is doing something for and in our communities.
