Lands Ministry 'mismanaged...in bad shape'Friday, August 1, 2008
Brigitte Weidlich
The Namibian
THE Ministry of Lands and Resettlement's land reform programme is "in bad shape and mismanaged on just about every level", a new report claims.
Based on a recent court case in which three foreign farm owners won a case against the Ministry - with their lawyers proving that the expropriation process was not followed correctly as stipulated by the laws and the Constitution - two experts have analysed the High Court ruling.
In the report, 'A new jurisprudence for land reform in Namibia?', US law Professor Sidney Harring and Namibian land expert Willem Odendaal concluded that the Ministry had to shake up if it was to deliver a proper and transparent land reform process, to fulfil the purpose of alleviating poverty and increasing agricultural productivity.
WRONG CULTURE German farm owners Guenther Kessl of Okozongutu West and Gross Ozombutu farms, Josef Riedmaier of Welgelegen Farm and a closed corporation that owns the farm Heimaterde took Government to court over procedural flaws in the expropriation process.
The Lands Ministry must now start the expropriation process again.
The Ministry has appealed to the ruling.
The future of altogether 100 farmworkers and their dependants on these four farms also hangs in the balance.
According to the report, the ruling in the Kessl case - in March - laid bare that the Ministry of Lands does not have the legal capacity to carry out land reform properly: it does not even have its own legal department.
A legal culture has not been instilled in the Ministry since its founding in 1990, the report states.
Instead, the Ministry has produced a culture of secrecy, conspiracy, insiders and outsiders and bureaucrats who think their job is to shuffle papers.
The Kessl case revealed that "officials do not follow rules and do not co-operate with the public, decisions are veiled in secrecy and poor decisions, often based on poor evidence, are then made and concealed", according to the authors.
TEST CASE The case of Kessl and the other applicants is regarded as a test case as the High Court ruled that foreign landowners might not be discriminated against by having their farms expropriated just because they are foreigners, but only if they are absentee farm owners.
This might be another judicial hurdle, however, as many previously disadvantaged Namibians who bought commercial farms are often on their farms only on some weekends.
The same might be argued for some resettlement beneficiaries, who are thus absentee farmers on State-owned farms.
Namibia has approximately 6 000 commercial farms which were owned by about 4 000 white farmers at Independence in 1990.
By the end of 2007, the Ministry had acquired 209 farms through the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle and some 9 000 people were resettled on them.
Another 600 farms changed ownership from white to black farmers through preferential loans from AgriBank under the Affirmative Action Loan Scheme (AALS), "but this will not alleviate poverty, since those who can afford to buy these farms are obviously not so poor", the authors noted.
"With the spectre of Zimbabwe looming over land reform over southern Africa, the failure of land reform represents a potential problem of political instability that goes to the core of the Swapo majority and strong support among the poor."
ONGOMBO WEST The first farm expropriation was of Farm Ongombo West 40 kilometres east of Windhoek some three years ago after a dispute with labourers over the death of a gosling.
The report queries whether it was justified, as expropriation can only be exercised by Government in the public interest, according to the Constitution.
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