Namibian Land Grabs coming

Original Post Date: 2001-09-05 Time: 12:06:05  Posted By: Jan

The following comes from Adriana Stuijt’s excellent Southern African news
website: WWW.CensorBugBear.com

Namibian tribes are issuing demands to be given privately-owned
farms now – threatening ethnic cleansing campaign if they don’t get free
land soon

Windhoek – Aug 18, 2001 — Namibia’s communal tribal farmers have urged
President Sam Nujoma’s government to speed up land reform — as their
restless communities are now also threatening Zimbabwe-style farm invasions.

Pintile Davids, representative for Namibia’s thousands of communal
subsistence tribal families — the organisation calls itself the Namibia
National Farmers Union (NNFU) — said President Sam Nujoma government’s
“willing-seller-willing-buyer” policy had “failed to address the land
imbalance in Namibia because, he said, “white commercial farmers were
unwilling to sell.”

He said this — in spite of the fact that more than 140 of the country’s
4,000 commercial farmers have already sold their land, and another 200 —
have also offered to sell up and move out within the next few years Most of
these farmers are Afrikaans-speaking, in fact much of their agricultural
literature can only be found in Afrikaans. Many other Afrikaner and
German-speaking farmers are also planning to leave Namibia to follow their
highly-educated offspring’s steady but relentless emigration from the African
continent.

Davids in fact asked for “the direct intervention” of the country’s president
during the communal farmers’ meeting attended by Nujoma on Aug 17, 2001.

R65-million has already been earmarked by the Namibian government previously
to help pay for purchasing 75 commercial farms, offered for sale by the
country’s 4,000 commercial farmers, comprising 465,568ha. And another
R100-million has now also been set aside to purchase another 75 farms over
the next five years. The tribal leaders view this process as far too slow and
are threatening with ethnic-cleansing campaigns similar to those in
Zimbabwe.

Most of the money was donated primarily by the German government and other
European Union countries for the purpose of “land-redistribution to
previously-disadvantaged farmers”.

The arid African country only has 1,7-million people.

Moreover, only 8% of the giant sand dune ever gets enough anual rainfall to
maintain any kind of viable commercial agricultural enterprises.

Most of its wheat consumptionihas to be imported. The country keeps afloat on
unprocessed export of its huge mineral wealth — uranium, diamonds and other
strategic minerals — comprising 60% of its GDP. Ten percent of its GDP
earnings come from its current agricultural exports — processed wool
products and livestock products – meat, leather, account for another 10%.

President Nujoma had earlier this year already lashed out angrily at the
country’s six percent minority group who are of ethnic-European stock —
targetting the country’s less than 4,000 commercial farmers, primarily
Afrikaners –“for owning 80 percent of farmland.” He forgot to mention
however that all these farms had been vastly improved by five generations of
Afrikaners who had carved them out of the desert in the first place.

Namibia’s commercial farmers managed to earn a living and keep feeding the
Namibian population only by very skillful soil enrichment, and good animal
and plant management — generations of farmers who had to import huge loads
of European topsoil and guano from adjacent Namibian coastal islands for the
past 100-odd years.

African animal husbandry:

These farmers also developed agricultural industries around their animal
husbandry skills with Africa’s hardy indigenous animals — developing new
breeds of livestock, highly prized for their international commercial value,
such as the commercially-bred ostriches for meat, leather and feathers; the
karakul (wool carpet weaving industry, fashion industry) and the various
Nguni commercial cattle breeds, bred for meat and leather exports.

Nujoma instead lambasted these hardy farmers for not immediately giving away
their carefully-nurtured ancestral farms for occupation by tribal subsistance
farm families, saying: “I don’t know if they consider themselves Namibian
citizens or if they are just cheating us by claiming they are compatriots,”
said Nujoma was quoted.

“Did they come with any sand to this country? At which point of this country
did they enter with sand in their bags to claim that they own land in
Namibia? They did not come with any farms,” he said.

Boer-bashing atmosphere growing:
Several months earlier, Swapo parliamentarian Ponhele Ya France, had also
started calling for the punishment of the country’s ethnic-Germans and
Afrikaners (he referred to them with the racist, generic term of “whites”)
for the “sins” committed by their forefathers, who he said “stole land from
the blacks.”

Ponhele Ya France said to much acclaim from SWAPO colleagues in parliament
that it was painful for landless people having to pay for land “naturally and
legally ours”. His sentiments were loudly supported by other Swapo members.

Ya France told Parliament that the Namibian government’s policy of setting
aside R20-million annually for the purchase of commercial land for
resettlement was a painful act to endure because the “land was stolen by
whites.”

Ya France also claimed that punishing the descendants of wrongdoers was an
acceptable international practice, “hence the Germans are paying for the
crimes they have committed against the Jews – What are we being told here?”

“Just grab the land like in Zimbabwe”
Another SWAPO party stalwart — Namibian trade union leader Risto Kapenda,
president of the Swapo-affiliated Public Workers Union — in April also urged
landless Namibians to grab land in the same way as was happening in Zimbabwe.

Kapenda said that the Namibian government’s slow land reform policies were
not supported by the people. “Government leaders who who defended it were not
speaking on behalf of the people,” he said, adding:

“If I should advise the nation on what to do, (I would say) just grab the
land like in Zimbabwe.”

In april, the Namibian cabinet announced having budgeted R100-million for
land resettlement during the next five years to buy commercial farm land
with.

They already had earmarked previous funds to pay for purchasing 75 farms,
offered for sale by commercial farmers, comprising 465,568ha.

Desert country, Afrikaans-speaking, primarily Christian:
The vast desert country — where the common language between the many tribes
remains Afrikaans, with more than 60% of the population speaking it — has
half of the population belonging to the ruling party’ SWAPO’s Ovambo tribe;
another 9% are Kavangos; Herero 7%, Damara 7%, Nama 5%, Caprivian 4%,
Bushmen 3%, Baster (mixed race) 2%, Tswana 0.5%.

Of the 6% ethnic-European population, forty percent are German-speaking and
60% Afrikaners. The country is also primarily Christian — 80 to 90%, with
about half being Lutherans.

Indigenous Africanist beliefs are adhered to by about 10% to 20% of the
population. The official language since 1990 is English – but only about 6%
of the primarily Ovambo government elite seems to be using it in their daily
lives, statistics have shown.

The battle for 8% of Namibia’s viable land:
Since independence, the government has already bought 568,800-ha, in total 97
farms, less than a 10th of what SWAPO’s leaders claim would be needed to
resettle the rest of the entire tribal population of 1,5-million people —
namely 9,5 million hectares. Agriculture is the socio-economic mainstay for
seventy percent of Namibia’s 1,5-milllion tribal people, directly or
indirectly dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihood. Many
thousands of Africans also have employment, homes and schools for their
families on Afrikaner farms. As is customary throughout Southern Africa, on
average, one Afrikaner commercial farmer usually employs at least 40 African
workers, depending on the extent of the agricultural enterprise.
Labour-intensive farms such as fruit farms, employ larger number of people.
Namibia’s farms are less labour-intensive than those in neighbouring South
Africa. However all Afrikaner farm owners often house, feed and educate large
numbers of extensive tribal family units throughout the sub-continent.

In 1994, Namibia still had 4,045 commercial crop-producing farms — about
30.5-million hectares of agricultural land, privately owned by farmers of
primarily German and Afrikaner stock. About 2,2-million hectares are occupied
by 243,000 communal subsistence farm farmers.

The country’s excess crop production is maintained 93% of the time only by
the commercial farmers. ( link:)
http://www.agrinamibia.com.na/html/whowe.htm)a
(E-mail:[email protected]

Since gaining independence in 1990, about 35,000 Namibian subsistence family
farmers are being moved onto former commercial farmland purchased by the
government for this purpose with funds donated by the German government. It
is seen however that these subsistence families do not produce excess food
crops and are only maintaining their own needs — meaning that the country’s
agricultural exports are going to drop steadily as the process of
“redistribution of land” marches on. As is seen in neighbouring Zimbabwe,
Kenya, Malawi and Botswana, Africa’s subsistence tribal communities have
great difficulty in maintaining sufficient food security under the invariably
difficult African farming conditions.

The records also show that — until this recently launched campaign for
“redistribution of high-yield commercial farmland — the sub-Saharan
region’s relatively few commercial ethnic-European farmers have always
managed to stave off famine from this part of the African continent for
several centuries. In fact their excess crop production created a viable
agricultural export market in addition to providing sustenance to at least
100-million Africans.

This is the commercial agricultural sector which is now being willfully
destroyed by their leaders’very ill-advised Africanisation policies.

Threatening noises to occupy farm land:
Pintile Davids, representative for Namibia’s communal subsistence tribal
families — the organisation calls itself the Namibia National Farmers Union
(NNFU) — said President Sam Nujoma government’s
“willing-seller-willing-buyer” policy had “failed to address the land
imbalance in Namibia because, he said, “white commercial farmers were
unwilling to sell.”

He said this — in spite of the fact that more than 140 of the country’s
4,000 commercial farmers have already sold their land, and another 200 —
have also offered to sell up and move out within the next few years. About
3,500 of these farmers are Afrikaans-speaking, in fact much of their
agricultural literature can only be found in Afrikaans.

Davids in fact asked for “the direct intervention” of the country’s president
during the communal farmers’ meeting attended by Nujoma on Thursday night.

Davids also threatened that the slow pace of land reform “could produce
another Zimbabwe” — thus pretending that the takeovers of Zimbabwe’s
commercial farms had been impromptu invasions by desperately homeless people,
instead of these invasions having been government-orchestrated.
Adding an even more threatening note, Davids warned: “We would like to extend
a word of caution to our countrymen. Do not push us too far… we are capable
of doing anything.”

History of commercial agriculture in Namibia:
Nomadic tribes in the region lost almost their entire arable land during
Namibia’s 1904-07 colonial war with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany.

Namibia — with its vast expanses of sand dunes and inhospitable desert,
which includes the bleak but diamond-rich, infamous Skeleton Coast — has in
fact always had very little arable agricultural land suitable for settlement.

Before German and Afrikaner missionaries and agricultural settlers had
arrived there, none of the local nomadic tribes had ever tilled or
permanently settled on the land to produce excess crops.

Even now, the country’s grain has to be mostly imported, while the livestock
sector, based on indigenous breeds, primarily exports meat and leather to
South Africa and the European Union.

Lately, Namibia’s game farming industry is growing due to demand from the
tourism and hunting industries. Ostrich farming is also increasing.

Commercial farming also produces maize, sorghum, groundnuts, sunflowers,
fruit and vegetables. Floriculture and hydroponic crops are exported to
Europe by air fronm Windhoek airport.

Where do Namibia’s farms come from?
The German and Afrikaner settlers — primarily farmers and missionaries —
who arrived there from the early 19th century onward, actually have for
generations been enriching and developing the present commercial agricultural
lands themselves and developing some uniquely hardy indigenous livestock
adapted to the region’s harsh desert conditions.

Often, the farms now owned by the commercial farmers represent many
generations of hard work to improve the soil: the present agricultural land
often had to be carved out of the semi-desert, and with great difficulty:
many boatloads of enriched foreign soil and fertiliser from island bird
sanctuaries along the Namibian coast were carted in for generations to
improve the soil; desalinated water these days is also being piped in at
high cost from the coast; and Namibian farmers have become world experts at
farming with hardy indigenous plants and livestock, and with waste water
recycling — even capturing aerial moisture with huge screens.

Namibia actually is an excruciatingly dry region where only the most skilled
agriculturalists can eke out a living — only 8 percent of this huge country
is suitable for crop-growing, meaning that farmers consider themselves lucky
if they get 700mm of rain a year. A full 55% of the country can only be
described as a huge sanddune-spotted sandpit landscape where the annual
rainfall never reaches 300mm.

In 33% of the country’s arid regions ( where annual rainfall hardly ever
reaches 300mm) farmers have developed nomadic indigenous livestock such as
karakul, ostriches and Nguni cattle — which manage to thrive in the harshest
veld conditions. About 3,500 of these farmers are Afrikaans-speaking, in fact
much of their agricultural literature can only be found in Afrikaans.

The commercial Namibian Karakul farmers
link: http://www.agrinamibia.com.na/ — went through a very wealthy peak
period from 1980 because the international fashion industry discovered
Karakul wool — which in turn set in motion a viable export wool industry
for the region’s unique and very beautiful Swakara wool, which is also woven
into beautiful tapestries and carpets for the tourist industry.

In 1980, Namibia exported more than 2,7-million karakul lamb pelts, earning
the country R64-million; by 1999, the number of produced pelts dropped to
73,685 — but were still earning R14,1-million in export earnings because the
price of karakul pelt tonnage had risen from R14.23 in 1980, to R155.27 in
1999. (source: http://www.agrinamibia.com.na/html/karakul.ht…Much of the
pelts are used for Namibia’s very excellent local rug weaving industries.

When the karakul export market collapsed because the fashion industry lost
interest, Namibian farmers turned to meat production from other, equally
hardy desert-adapted livestock (such as the Kashivi Nguni breed:
http://studbook.co.za/veldman.html ) – beef, lamb, ostrich and goat. Now,
meat is Namibia’s agricultural cornerstone.

Yet the “Africanisation” of commercial agriculture in Southern Africa marches
on relentlessly, accompanied by vicious racism aimed at all ethnic-European
farmers: an ethnic cleansing campaign in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and
threats to launch a similar campaign from Namibian leaders.

Sam Nujoma in August 2001 again chastised the country’s commercial farmers —
saying it was their “duty to ensure that they gave their full support to
government initiatives aimed at improving the living conditions of those who
were disadvantaged before independence.”

Namibia, formerly South West Africa, became a League of Nations (forerunner
of the United Nations) protectorate which was placed by that international
body under the control of Colonial British govenrment management, which
handed the German colonial region’s management to south Africa’s invading
forces when Germany lost World War One.

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