Farmers unite against land grab

Black and white Namibian farmers joined forces on Monday to put pressure on the government to speed up land reform to avoid Zimbabwe-style farm invasions, ‘The Namibian’ reported on Tuesday. “Although many of our people ... need land to improve their living conditions, political anarchy, violence, land-grabbing and farm invasions and mismanagement should be avoided at all costs,” Moses Katjiuongua said at the launch of a farmers’ group called Beyond 2000 Movement. He warned the government to deal swiftly with land reform or face “another Zimbabwe”, where hundreds of mainly white-owned farms have been seized by veterans of the 1970s liberation war with the support of President Robert Mugabe’s government. Although Namibia has suffered no farm invasions, farmers fear landless people will soon grow impatient with the slow pace of reform. Since independence from South Africa in 1990, only about 35,000 Namibians have been resettled on commercial farmland. Some 243,000 are still waiting for land and to resettle them the government needs millions of dollars to buy 9.5 million hectares. Namibia has 4,045 commercial farms. About 30.5 million hectares of land is owned by white farmers and only 2.2 million hectares by black farmers, according to government statistics. Indigenous Namibian tribal groups, such as the Hereros and Namas, lost almost their entire arable land during the 1904-07 colonial war with Germany. Namibia, formerly South West Africa, became a South African protectorate when Germany lost World War One. Katjiuongua said his movement would push for taxes on surplus or excessive land and wants the government to engage independent evaluators for a willing-seller willing-buyer plan.