Foreign ownership of land further restricted

A proposed amendment to Namibia's land policy is expected to make it harder for foreign nationals to own land in the country. The Namibian newspaper reported that Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Minister Hifikepunye Pohambe officially introduced the amendment in the national assembly on Wednesday. "One of the loopholes in the current law is that landowners have avoided offering land to the state ... by registering their farms under close corporations (CCs) thus making it possible for foreign nationals to continue purchasing agricultural land in Namibia," the newspaper quoted Pohambe as saying. Namibia's SWAPO government is committed to the principle of "willing buyer/willing seller" - which means no one is forced to sell up, but if they do the state gets first refusal. Frans Tsheehama, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation told IRIN that under the proposed changes the government would now closely monitor the transfer of land to a CC or private company. "We have suspected for a long time now that farmers had been transferring ownership of land to foreign nationals without the knowledge or consent of the government. From now on, if a controlling interest of a firm that owns farmland changes, it will have to be reported to the government. The amendment will simply do away with the loopholes in the Act," Tsheehama said. Redistribution was a key aspect of Namibia's liberation war. Most agricultural land is in private hands with 20 percent of the population owning about 75 percent of the land. The amendment to the Act would also make it illegal for people who have been resettled on the land to buy and sell it whenever they wished. "We are therefore of the opinion that state land, which is acquired for the purpose of land reform, should not be for sale. It should rather serve as a place where some future potential commercial farmers should graduate from and be able to acquire their own agricultural land," Pohambe said. However, analysts and the country's largest farmer's union said it was still unclear how resettled farmers with limited resources would be turned into commercial farmers. "It is unlikely that the resettled farmers would become commercial farmers. They simply do not have the support or assets. The land they are given is merely for subsistence farming. So it is a bit idealistic to think that these farmers would be able to compete with established commercial farmers," director of the Namibia Agriculture Union, Gert Grobler, said. Wolfgang Werner, a land specialist at the Namibia Policy Research Unit told IRIN that most of the land bought by the government for resettlement was unsuitable for extensive commercial farming. "Resettled farmers find themselves on land that receives low and variable rainfall which is only suitable for livestock farming. There is no support for these farmers except when there are water shortages and then the government steps in to assist," Werner said. Resettled farmers are given between 1,000 ha and 3,000 ha. Tsheehama said 30,000 people have so far been successfully resettled. The government wants to resettle a further 243,000 people and has said it wants to acquire 9,5 million ha of land for its programme. Land reform will cost about N$900 million (US $90 million), Tsheehama said. The land reform debate resurfaced following comments by President Sam Nujoma at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg last month. Nujoma said he supported the land seizures being carried out by Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe. "Frustrated with the slow pace of land reform, the more radical elements within the trade unions and civil society have called for land redistribution without compensation. This is obviously very worrying for the government. It [the government] has to be seen to be doing something about the land issue," Werner said. Over N$20 million (US $2 million) was being spent every year to buy farms for redistribution, Tsheehama said. However, although hundreds of farms had been offered to the government for purchase, only a fraction had been bought. Asked why the government had not been able to buy more farms for redistribution, Werner said: "Of the 173 farms offered to the government during the 2000-2001 financial year only 18 were purchased. The government said the rest were unsuitable for resettlement. Part of the reason could be the lack of funding. Twenty million [Namibian dollars] does not buy a lot of land. But also, the administrative capacity within the ministry is very limited."