Land To The People?

THIS past week the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement shared with us its refreshed strategic plan. The magic figure the ministry is working on is to acquire five million hectares for resettlement by 2020. For this purpose, the ministry has so far acquired 2,4 million hectares of land which has been farmed out to about 5 000 previously disadvantaged individuals.

While the numbers do not look impressive, at face value, the beneficiaries represent an elite of the government’s affirmative action as this group of farmers continue to rely on further government input post-resettlement. It is also important to make the point though, that the ‘beneficiaries’ on these resettlement farms have only usufruct rights as the government remains the owner of the land.

Parallel to this, the government is encouraging residents of communal areas to register a maximum of 20 hectares of land for farming purposes, which subsequently becomes their property. About 14 000 Namibians have so far taken advantage of this facility.

Despite the difference in size, it is clear that it is the latter group, which is acquiring a tradable asset in the fashion in which Hernando de Soto explains in his seminal treatise, ‘The Mystery of Capital’. In pursuance of its 20 hectares programme, the government recently embarked on an aggressive exercise of purchasing farms to enlarge ‘communal areas’. The question remains whether the objectives of resettlement and increased (national) agricultural output are complimentary or necessarily mutually exclusive?

Also, the present pattern of resettlement, on balance, appears to swell the class of the marginal communal folk with the inevitable few ‘kulaks’, who are invariably civil servants and others who have been allocated choice land and joined the ranks of weekend farmers. The consequence of this is that the lot of farm workers and those eking out a living from marginal lands have not improved. Therefore, the present resettlement may not achieve the objective of equity.

In addition, it is a feature of Namibia’s economy that farming and, by extension, agriculture employs the largest number of the labour force. Its low contribution to the GDP must mean, at least in part, that there are huge inefficiencies as a result of high costs of inputs required to make it worthwhile, compounded by our unforgiving land and environment.

As elsewhere, an increasing number of labour will in future have to move to non-farm activities to find work and livelihood in industry and service sector; such is the logic of development. And within the context of the new employment policy unveiled last week, we need to have this dialogue about where jobs will come from in future in order to align this with training and the necessary incentives for optimum labour absorption.

In that context, the present definition to achieve ‘balance’ may become superfluous. For in a greater scheme of things demography and (hopefully) rising incomes will do the balancing.

This is by no means a suggestion to send the Minister of Lands and Resettlement and his corpus of bureaucrats on early retirement. Their visible hand in correcting our inheritance of social injustice may still have some course to run. The basis of growing our economy and giving greater access to Namibians in future may, however, lie in opening up and exploiting virgin areas such as the whole IT revolution in order to benefit from opportunities at the cutting edge of knowledge.

This is far from suggesting that every man, woman and child should not have his 20 hectares of land and learn to milk his cow. But if we forget navel gazing for a moment and look at what the likes of Rwanda are doing in transforming their economies with far fewer resources, we may just find the inspiration for what is possible with so little.

As our economy grows and given the high cost of our farming, new opportunities may simply eclipse the continued rationale for large scale farming. In that case, resources, inclusive of labour will shift to more economic pursuits. As Namibians, one of our long term challenges will be to manage the ever expanding desert as many marginal farms, particularly in the south, turn to dust. Overgrazing in other parts of the country will help to achieve the same result.

Given the minister’s comments on the mixed results achieved with resettlement to date, it is of critical importance to carry out the necessary audits in order to develop a manual of the “dos and donts” of resettlement. After all, the core of good public administration is not to throw good money after the bad – the cycle is implement, monitor, evaluate, implement.

It is an unavoidable principle of economic life that there are competing demands for the same resources. The trick is to make judicious choices.

So yes, there will never be enough resources for resettlement programmes as there will be for education for example. It is neither desirable nor feasible to resettle all in the name of achieving the objectives of ‘balance’.