Two countries, one border, similar history, same anxieties over land
Namibia, SA share notes on tackling the thorny expropriation issue
● In January, plumes of black smoke rose from the mass of informal housing in Philippi, Cape Town, where residents of the Marikana community were once again protesting against the threat of forced removals from their homes.
Two weeks before that, 1,500km away and across the border in Namibia’s capital city, Windhoek, police were called to stop about 250 people from grabbing land at the Goreangab informal settlement.
For these citizens, and millions more like them, land is more than a means of settlement; it enshrines food production, financial stability and historical justice. SA and Namibia are undergoing a parallel struggle to expedite land reform, each choosing different legislative tools of expropriation to realign skewed ownership patterns.
The countries share a similar apartheid colonialist legacy as well as the imperative to deliver on constitutional promises made more than two decades ago while quelling mounting pressure from their historically oppressed black majority. These forces are increasingly defined by the question of land ownership.
Last month, SA’s minister of rural development & land reform, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, hosted a Namibian delegation headed by that country’s urban & rural development minister, Peya Mushelenga, for bilateral discussions on land reform policy formulation and implementation.
The discussions came on the back of Namibia’s National Land Conference in October, only the second of its kind since the country attained independence in 1990. At the conference, Namibia opted to scrap the willing-seller, willing-buyer model and replace it with expropriation with just and equitable compensation — which is provided for in its constitution.
The overhaul of Namibia’s land policy also comes with recommendations to prioritise locals in the allocation of residential land to cater for the backlog of about 200,000 people in desperate need of urban property.
I sat with both ministers, in a very small boardroom on a very large and expensive estate in Centurion, Gauteng, to discuss the outcome of their meeting.
Said Mushelenga: “First we had a land conference in 1991 which decided on the issue of willing buyer, willing seller. You have absent landlords, people who owned commercial farms, they are not there. In the meantime there are people who need land urgently.
“Those that have means to acquire land in SA are the same people who have means to acquire land in Namibia. So, we are dealing with inequalities in terms of land ownership because our economy is not balanced.”
This inequality is reflected in a report released last month by the Namibian Statistics Agency. It showed Namibia’s land tenure consists of 23% state land, 35% communal land and 42% freehold agricultural (commercial) land.
Whites, who the report describes as “previously advantaged Namibians”, own 27.8-million hectares (or 70%) of the freehold agricultural land, while blacks own only 6.4-million hectares (or 16%). Furthermore, over 70% of the Namibian population is believed to make their living from communal land.
The situation is not largely different in SA. A highly anticipated land audit report from the department of rural development & land reform found that black South Africans, who make up 79% of the population, own only 1.2% of all rural land and 7% of formal property in cities. The report, released last year, did not make findings on agricultural land and its distribution.
There followed an audit by SA’s largest agricultural body, AgriSA, which found that black citizens own 26.7% of agricultural land and control more than 46% of SA’s agricultural output. The report said white farmers’ ownership of agricultural ground had declined from 85.1% in 1994 to 73.3% in 2016.
Said Nkoana-Mashabane: “They [Namibia] have models that have worked. They have used a model which we are still struggling with, of co-operatives, which also goes into food feeding schemes and sustenance of small co-operatives started by rural people … we want to learn lessons from their experiences because they were liberated first.
“Indeed, the willing buyer, willing seller didn’t necessarily produce the right kind of fruits we desired. We also tried that and only got 4% of the land back through that process.”
SA has opted for a different route on reform. The National Assembly has given the nod to a recommendation by the Constitutional Review Committee that the constitution be amended to allow for expropriation without compensation.
But is it bad policymaking or a general lack of implementation that is to blame for the fact that land reform has taken place at such snail’s pace in both countries?
In Namibia, only 3-million hectares has been acquired through the government’s National Resettlement Programme since 1990, benefiting slightly more than 5,000 people. Only 6.4-million hectares has been acquired through the Affirmative Action Loan Scheme Programme and commercial bank funding since 1992.
SA’s inquiry into the impact of transformative legislation, chaired by former president Kgalema Motlanthe, noted that “other constraints, including increasing evidence of corruption by officials, the diversion of the land reform budget to elites, lack of political will, and lack of training and capacity have proved more serious stumbling blocks to land reform”.
With both countries heading to general elections next year, the ANC and Namibia’s Swapo are scrambling to answer the land question.
For the ANC, which is skating on thin ice (polls give it about 54% of electoral support), finding a solution to the land issue is paramount for its survival — especially when the EFF is vying for a share of youth and working-class vote on the same political ticket.
Meanwhile, residents of Marikana informal settlement in Philippi, many of whom have been living in ankle-deep mud and free-flowing sewage for years, will continue fighting to keep their makeshift homes in the hope that someday the government’s promises to them will be fulfilled.