Namibia vows to change status quo of white farm ownership

Vibrant rows of neatly lined plants grow on a patch once trampled by the cattle of a large commercial farm run by a family of German descent in Namibia.

From that 2,400m² rectangle of sand in the northern Otjozondjupa region, Kornelius Hamasab, 69, now produces spinach, onions and tomatoes.

Hamasab is among the 16% of black Namibians owning arable land in the semi-desert nation. White Namibians, descended from former colonisers Germany and SA, make up 6% of the population and own 70% of the land.

“It doesn’t seem right to me,” said Hamasab, who acquired his land as compensation five years after the farm downsized into a guest house in 2000 and laid off its staff.

“The government should do something about it,” he said, while his family picked and rinsed vegetables to be sold in Windhoek, 150km away.

Namibia adopted a “willingbuyer, willing-seller” approach to land reform after independence from SA in 1990.

Farmers wishing to sell their business must first offer it to the state, which parcels it into smaller plots and redistributes to “previously disadvantaged Namibians”.

That strategy has done little to redress the imbalance, however, prompting President Hage Geingob to call for a more muscular approach.

“The willing-buyer, willingseller principle has not delivered results,” Geingob told a land conference last year, adding the “status-quo should not be allowed to continue”.

Geingob has since demanded constitutional amendments to allow for the forceful expropriation of white-owned commercial farms with “fair compensation”.

His proposal has echoed controversial plans in SA to expropriate land without compensation.

You cannot take a man from under a tree ... and put him on a farm. You must enable people first

It also brought back memories of land seizures in Zimbabwe in 2003, when thousands of white farmers were chased off their properties.

Helmut Halenke’s grandfather Otto left the German state of Bavaria in 1908 and sailed thousands of kilometres to Namibia, where he bought farmland.

Otto’s investment grew into a successful family-run beef farm and game hunting spot for tourists, and is now owned by his 41-year-old great grandson.

Squinting across a parched stretch of bushland seared by an ongoing drought, Halenke, 67, said he doubted Namibia’s cash-strapped government would come after the property any time soon.

Namibia’s commercial farmers’ union estimates about eight million hectares of land have been offered to the government since independence. Only three million were purchased.

“The white community is selling their land,” said Bernardus Swartbooi, a former deputy land minister who registered his own party, Landless People’s Movement (LPM), after a spat with the government last year.

He accused the government of using land reform to empower a “small elite”.

“Most of those that they want to resettle are their friends.”

Geingob, who has been reelected for another five-year term, has pledged to redistribute 43% of arable land by 2020 to previously disadvantaged Namibians. Many fear this could cripple agricultural production if not “done in the right way”.

“You cannot take a man from under a tree ... and put him on a farm,” said Halenke. “You must enable people first.”

Hamasab is all too familiar with the back-breaking labour it takes to profit from Namibia’s meagre soils. He was also supported by his former employer and received advice from German agricultural experts.

But most resettled Namibians have not been so lucky.

“The resettlement programme is not accompanied by a wholesale agrarian reform,” said Swartbooi, adding that poor farmers needed funding to mechanise production.

Namibian government representatives declined several requests for an interview.