Namibians should utilise the green schemes

According to the World Food Programme’s latest Hunger Hotspots report, there are 43 million people in 38 countries that are at the risk of famine or a serious food crisis unless they receive immediate life-saving support. Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Yemen are the countries with the highest levels of hunger. Surprisingly, Namibia did not make it to the list. Does that mean people are not starving in Namibia? It cannot be a country of less than three million inhabitants where about a million people are living in shacks. Shacks represent poverty, which is always associated with hunger. If there are leaders disagreeing, let them swap houses with those residing in informal settlements such as Babylon and Okahandja Park. They will definitely refuse.

The government's desire to lease out the 11 green schemes to foreign investors is unappealing to many Namibians who aspire to be agribusinessmen.For decades, Namibia has been dependent on South Africa in terms of food. Namibia spends billions of dollars on imported goods, of which many are fresh produce and other processed foods from our neighbouring countries, particularly South Africa. Have we ever thought of what will happen if South Africa locks her border abruptly? Namibians will definitely perish from hunger since we are heavily dependent on South Africa when it comes to food. Clearly, this will be the government’s fault for failing to secure food security for the past 32 years. Imagine a country with so many rivers and an ocean that is still importing water from South Africa.

Despite President Hage Geingob urging young people to start using their qualifications to innovate and create jobs rather than depend on the government for employment, it seems like minister Carl-Herman Schlettwein holds a different view. The two are putting the government in a contradictory state because they are not singing the same song. The Minister of Agriculture is contrary to the president’s idea. He believes Namibians cannot operate the green schemes, thus he is opting for foreign investors, which is bad for local businesses and has made Naloba and other local associations very angry. Naloba strongly condemned the minister's decision and labelled it as unfair. When will we give chances to our graduates? Why do we even have universities if we cannot provide jobs for our graduates? The green schemes should be handed over to local business owners if the government is failing to maintain them, and if they are also failing, then the government can go to foreign investors.

Recently, a 9-year-old girl was run over by a vehicle for picking beans on the white man’s farm. All these are results of hunger, yet we have the Minister of Agriculture opening up the green schemes for international investors while his own people are killed for picking up beans. We have Chinese bosses shooting our people at their workplaces. What makes the government think that investors from Dubai will not act similarly?

I give credit to the government for maintaining peace and stability since 1990. Our government has done well to ensure that the country is politically stable, but it has massively failed to provide food for its people. People are going to bed on hungry stomachs. HIV/Aids patients are walking long distances to health centres to collect ARVs and still take them on hungry stomachs. Pupils in rural areas are walking long distances to attend classes on empty stomachs which makes it difficult to concentrate and catch-up during lessons. Streets in central towns are full of hungry people begging for food. The impact of food insecurity will do the greatest damage to our economy and state. The government is slowly but surely creating zombies in our country. When people get tired of hunger, they will start thinking with their stomachs becoming hard to control, which will result in looting. We have ample time to correct all this. We shouldn't wait until it is too late to act.

Is it land that we do not have to grow our crops and produce our own food? We have adequate land. We also have more than 10 green schemes. The government is not merely failing to solve housing and land issues being experienced in the country. It has fatally failed to provide land for agricultural purposes to its people. Opening up the green schemes to foreign competition proves how happy the government is to see locally-owned businesses suffocating or being dominated by foreign-owned firms. Leasing out the available green schemes to international investors over local investors will show how determined the government is in destroying local businesses. The Namibian government has already failed to provide market protection to local businesses from international competitors. While South Africans are pushing for the amendment of section 25 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 in pursuit of land expropriation without paying compensation, the Namibian government is busy selling land to foreign countries such as China and the USA to build their embassies while government ministries are renting privately owned buildings. Namibian people should probably forget owning land because the government has failed to secure land for itself to construct more public offices.

This is a great opportunity to improve and boost our farming and agriculture industries. Namibia needs to start producing its own food and stop being a dependent country. It is very disturbing to process how a country of less than 3 million people is still depending on a nation of over 50 million people in terms of food while it was supposed to be the other way round (Namibia supplying its surplus to South Africa). With a large expanse of unoccupied land, we still have 43.3 percent of Namibia's population living in poverty. We cannot produce enough food to feed our people. Traffic lights in the capital city of Namibia are full of job beggars. Don’t we see them every day? Most of those people begging for jobs at every corner in Windhoek, particularly the ones at the traffic lights, are over 30 and uneducated. It is hard to take those people back to school, but Naloba, together with the Ministry of Agriculture, can collaborate to create employment opportunities. That can only come to reality if the government withdraws its RFP offer to international investors. Naloba narrated that the country cannot have its green schemes operated by foreigners while Namibians are capable of running them in a sustainable way. Where they struggle, they will seek help from other African countries that are doing well in agriculture, such as Tunisia, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda or South Africa. If they fail to get assistance that is when they will seek expert assistance from the Middle East, America, Europe and Asia.

Is the government that buys Tastic rice from Shoprite to hand over to people as food relief really serious about combating malnutrition and poverty in the country? The food bank was a great initiative, but the fact that the government buys most of the food from retail shops that are expensive and not even locally owned makes the whole initiative ineffective. If the government seriously wants to end poverty in Namibia, why doesn't it provide land to grow food? Why doesn’t the government splash or invest those millions into green schemes and recruit unemployed people to produce its own rice that can be handed over to the nation in the form of food relief and sell the surplus to retail shops?

Investing in agriculture will ensure economic transformation, food security, and nutrition. Agricultural modernization prepares conditions for industrialisation by boosting labour productivity, increasing agricultural surplus to accumulate capital, and increasing foreign exchange through exports. This would also result in a decrease in food prices, which have skyrocketed since the invasion of Russia into Ukraine. The government should conduct a feasibility study on the Zambezi and Okavango regions. Those three provinces can feed the whole of Namibia. The regions receive plenty of rain, and their soils are rich in nutrients.