A socialist perspective on the land question

The entry into the controversial land issue is based on three basic premises, at least from a socialist perspective. The first is that land is one of the major means of production – whether one is talking about urban land for housing/shelter or rural land for agricultural/farming purposes – land is the mother of all resources of production so to speak.

Secondly, traditional African communities used to hold land as a common resource – the commons, which today is under threat, as we shall elaborate on later in this piece. Thirdly, as a socialist groomed in that tradition during the exile years, we regarded the ultimate objective as one of establishing an egalitarian and classless society based on the principles of scientific socialism upon independence – with land being central to that dream/objective.

So it goes without saying that true socialists will never entertain the idea of private ownership of land. Even one of the greatest defenders of private property, the philosopher John Locke, admitted that political economy had no defence for landed property. He was in agreement with other natural theorists of his time that land is and should not become the property of a single individual or corporation.

But who will stop the Swapo capitalist machine from enforcing what is essentially a neo-colonial land policy? But it is not just Swapo alone in this crusade to privatise what is supposed to be a common resource. There are other neo-liberal academics who are also championing private ownership of land. Take Uchendu Eugene Chigbu's piece: "Banning Foreign Land Ownership in Namibia: If it’s Anti-Foreigners, it’s Anti-Africa." (The Namibian, 24 June 2022). Even a good scholar like Ndumba Kamwanya is quoted as saying: "There is nothing inappropriate about foreigners owning local land, as it benefits the economy."

There are other compatriots who were in exile but who own farms today.

Flawed programme

The present head of state, Hage Geingob, and former presidents Sam Nujoma and Hifikepunye Lucas Pohamba, own farms, and so do their deputies, and a host of 'who is who’ in the country – sometimes more than one. As we are writing now, government is upgrading vice-president Nangolo Mbumba’s sprawling 5 330 hectare farm.

Apparently, the comrades have forgotten that the struggle was about giving land back to the people – hence the rationale behind the now flawed resettlement programme, which was premised on the perceived scarcity of land in communal areas, thus the need to unlock some of the land held under a private regime for resettlement.

Then, out of the blue, there is now enough land in the communal areas. Everyone can now fence off 20 hectares. How they have arrived at that figure, we are not sure.

But we are sure the elite are saying: 20 hectares is better than nothing, otherwise you will be coveting/crave for my 5 000 hectare farm. To add insult to injury, the government says there is now enough but unproductive land in the communal areas that foreigners can lease for 99 years. We had about 100 years of colonial rule; now another 99 years of land ownership by foreigners? As an aside, if the commercial areas are productive, where is the wheat? How about the government's green/dry scheme?

If the 20 hectares and the 99-year lease laws are implemented, it would be the re-writing of colonial historiography. Namibia would be the first country in the 21st century to turn a common resource into private property using political force – because laws are not always just as we know from our colonial experience.

The commons, as we know them, will now be eliminated. It is that 17th century historical experience that the Europeans carried over to Africa, where they sub-divided the land into private property, that we are mimicking and maintaining today.

There is therefore nothing progressive regarding the land issue that Swapo has been undertaking over the past 32 years since independence.

They are just taking the colonial experience and history to its logical conclusion by completely privatising common land.

Redistribution

As the socialist scholar, Professor Archie Mafeje, has written: "The whole debate about land in Namibia is not about the livelihood of the dispossessed in the countryside but about how best to maintain the status quo. This could be true of white farmers, the government, as well as the black notables in the so-called communal areas."

Mafeje is not alone in this view.

One of Namibia’s leading land experts, Wolfgang Werner, says: "The pace of land reform, and in particular land redistribution, is not likely to accelerate significantly in the foreseeable future. The main reason for this is that the political balance of forces is stacked against the landless and dispossessed in particular."

At one of their many retreats in Swakopmund some years back, Cabinet took a resolution that illegally fenced off land would have to be de-fenced. This didn’t happen, and the process of fencing off communal land continues.

After they have finished enclosing the land and the Namibian landscape is criss-crossed with fences, the question is how many children are going to inherit a 20-hectare piece of land from their parents? Historically, the most common political objective of land reform was to abolish colonial forms of land ownership, often by taking land from large-scale farmland and absentee land-owners and redistributing it to the landless.

The Swapo leadership has been feeling ashamed that they have been fooling the people, pretending as if they were concerned with their plight, while they themselves were just scrambling to join the big land barons, including absentee landlords, to acquire farms. The classic case: the PM, Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, who last year sold two farms for a cool N$15 million to government, ostensibly for resettlement purposes.

The irony of all this is that the previous owner of those farms offered them to the government for resettlement, but it, we are told, said they were not suitable for resettlement.

Socialise land

The rest is history. The whole issue of government policy of dividing the common land into 20 hectares per person clearly speaks to the failure of the resettlement programme – which has been hijacked by the elite of all stripes and hues.

Sometimes I wonder how some of these people get appointed as ministers, deputies, executive directors and board members of our SOEs – as some of these souls have no understanding, in the sense that Hannah Arendt would use, of the issues that they are supposed to address.

I have in the past suggested that the solution is not to privatise the commons but to buy farms which are adjacent to communal land and open them up in order to increase the communal space. Buying farms like Ongombo West/East and then settling a single family there does not make sense in our view.

Thus, we have to socialise more land and not privatise it further. That is how we should address the unresolved land issue. But the ultimate solution to the land question will not come from those useless land conferences organised by the elite but from a genuine socialist revolution spearheaded by the landless and the working classes.