Schlettwein says land bill must address colonial land disparities

By: Envaalde Matheus

The former agriculture minister, Calle Schlettwein, says the land bill must tackle the country’s skewed land ownership structure.

The land bill is designed to unify and streamline land governance by consolidating laws governing communal and commercial land into a single legal framework.

Schlettwein said the bill elapsed due to the prolonged formulation process and had to be tabled at the end of the 7th National Assembly.

The retired minister said the bill prohibits foreign nationals from acquiring communal and commercial land to correct historical imbalances.

“The balancing out of the availability of land as a means of production is not only a political priority. It’s also an economic priority. And let me start with the political one. Yes, we have a very skewed economy, we have a very skewed land ownership in the country and that has been created by both colonial eras that we went through, by the German colonial era and the South African ones. Black people were deprived of their land, their livelihood, and there were forced removals, there were genocides, all ugly things that should never have happened.” he said.

Schlettwein said the situation deprived the majority of Namibians of their livelihood and land.

“That needs to be corrected. Now the land reform programme must address that, but you cannot address it only by availing land. The productivity of that land, which creates the livelihood for the resettled people, must also be assured.”

Schlettwein also noted that, despite land redistribution efforts, the government has struggled to ensure that resettled farmers can productively use the land they received.

“I believe that our resettlement efforts were weak in assuring that the productivity of the land that we acquired and utilised for resettlement purposes were indeed productive.”

“There are some exceptions, some resettlement farmers are doing very well, but the majority are struggling, they are not doing well.

So the way forward is, I believe, two ways. We must make more resources available to acquire land because the whole resettlement process is too slow to be a meaningful tool for redistributive actions in the land sector. We are not doing enough. So resources must be improved to do that,” he said.