Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
A draft progress report on the implementation of the 2018 Second National Land Conference resolutions is in circulation as has been leaked by the media recently.
A good five years after the 2018 conference, the government seems only to awaken now, in the eyes of a cursory observation of an outsider, to the pretension fo wanting to eventually implement the said resolutions. How real such a reawakening is, only time will tell. But it would not be preposterous to think that the reawakening is only now on the eve of the country’s Presidential and National Assembly Elections next year.
Hence the genuine and seasoned suspicion that the seeming reawakening may not be so honest but politically callously calculated. Another election ploy directed at the usually unsuspecting voting pawns. With land distribution as voting fodder. Because when it comes to land redistribution, the Namibian government has so far proven itself at best nothing more than its usual self doling out land to a selected few. Not only this but its land redistribution and resettlement policy, if ever existent, has been awfully lacking in coherency and in seriousness in terms of earnestly redistributing land for those deserving. Not redistribution for its own sake but based on discernible principles and framework of egalitarianism, if not communalism, communism and/or socialism. Because this far, whatever the government of the day may claim to have been doing, has never been and is not based on any clear policies and frameworks of an egalitarian land redistribution. Policies entailing the acquisition of land and its redistrib
ution according to a clear ideological position, which is a paradigm shift from the existing acquisition and redistribution mechanisms. Based on any coherent and sustainable mechanisms other than on trial and error.
Land acquisition and redistribution to be of any essence must be geared towards a vibrant sustainable agricultural sector. Which, more than anything else, is based on self-sustenance and subsistence in food production. Therefore and thereby enabling communities to be able to first produce food for themselves before anything else, which must only be an added advantage and for gain. Gain which for that matter must not be individual but communal.
An agricultural sector that develops and restore the requisite communal socio-economic equilibrium. This is the approach that must inform any land acquisition and redistribution in Namibia. On the contrary, empirical evidence on the ground regarding land acquisition and redistribution this far, does not point to any farsighted and well thought out ideologically-based approach, theoretically, practically and otherwise. This is despite the fact that the agricultural sector is supposedly symbiotically related and intertwined with land, given that it employs a significant number of the Namibian populous, if not most. This is the state of affairs because hitherto land acquisition and redistribution has been approached purely from its historic and emotive genesis of land dispossession in colonial capitalism. Much the same way as freedom, liberation and independence was approached purely from a nationalist emotional vantage.
As a corollary Namibia is today stuck in empty and meaningless freedom, liberation and independence, which as an end in itself and for its own sake. Rather than as a means towards an end. An end for that matter, 33 years after, that the country has never been able to define, if ever it shall define it. Freedom, liberation and independence that has come to be defined strictly in terms of civil and political rights only. But not in the essence of economic rights, and thus economic egalitarianism. This is where Namibia as a country is constipated today.
Shift this to and compare it with the issue of land, and its redistribution, and all evidence is pointing to Namibia heading if not already headed towards the same situation where the country is in the wilderness of the status quo. If not retrogression. With most, especially the previously dispossessed and exploited ever on the fringes of the economic doldrums of the so-called informal settlements and the communal hinterland where, long ago during colonial capitalism, were banished to, and are still entrapped and condemned to.
“The ultimate reason of development failure in Sub-Saharan Africa is that this region has not initiated the world of intensive agricultural process. While this necessary agricultural revolution implies an industrialization which has not been initiated.” Wrote eminent African socialist and scholar, Professor Samir Amin in a paper: Ideology and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa which he prepared for a Pan-African Conference on Thirty Years of Independence Results and Prospects. This very conference was held in Windhoek in 1991.
Yours Truly Ideologically cannot but note Professor Amin’s emphasis on the agricultural revolution as the route to industrialisation. Exactly, Yours Truly Ideologically’s expectation that land acquisition and redistribution in Namibia must be underpinned by its essence to the agricultural sector. But as matters seem in Namibia, there is and has been more talks about industrialisation than agriculturalisation. And when there is and has been the little talk that has been there about agriculture, it has been devoid of any talk about an agricultural revolution. Just as much as the current talk about land acquisition and redistribution consonant to the resolutions of the 2018 second land conference lacks any fundamental ideological premise. Based instead on a hollow acquisition and redistribution.
Not to mention the doctoring of the resolutions most of which are based on the sentiments of those who lost land to colonial capitalism. So that their implementation may be or are no longer in the letter and spirit of the sentiments of the land dispossessed who attended the land conference and moved them. Hence given their twisting, loosing their meaning in translation and implementation. The situation being what it seems and/or what is believed to be, can the land dispossessed have any expectation that land acquisition and redistribution as envisaged and inform the resolutions of the Second National Land Conference, ever address the land question. As opposed to those in charge of implementing the resolutions tailoring them in towards their own capitalist selfish and self-centered inclinations thus rendering the intended objectives of the Second National Land Conference resolutions to be lost in translation and implementation. Until when? Third National land Conference? Or never ever!
