Swapo ‘scared’ to talk land

After their arrest yesterday, landless livestock owners who invaded an idle government farm last weekend have accused Swapo of being ‘scared to talk about land’.

Instead, they applauded the ‘braveness’ of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), which has so far stood shoulder-to-shoulder with them in their quest for land.

Eight of them were arrested yesterday and appeared in the Gobabis Magistrate’s Court, where they were each granted N$800 bail.

The group vowed to return to the scene of their alleged crime, Farm Witsand, risking further arrest.

They were left without any land after they were evicted from Gobabis town land, on which their livestock previously grazed. Promises - spanning years - to relocate them on resettlement farms with their animals did not yield any fruit, they said.

Farms for comrades

“Many resettlement farms in this area have been given to Swapo comrades,” Lesley Pienaar, who cited farms Yellow Bank, Otjombahe and Rosendaal as examples of prime land occupied by people connected to the ruling party, said.

“Even our [Omaheke] governor, Pijoo Nganate, farms on land that should have been for the San people,” Pienaar alleged. Nganate could not be reached for comment.

Asked how the party is handling the emotive situation, Swapo’s Omaheke regional coordinator Ruth Kaukuata-Mbura said she has no comment. “I’m currently in a meeting, but even if you call tomorrow, I can’t guarantee that I will comment,” she said.

Yesterday’s arrest took place just a day after urban and rural development minister Erastus Uutoni held a meeting at Gobabis to discuss the invasions and landlessness in general.

“Nganate was very evasive during the meeting,” Pienaar recalled. “Gobabis constituency councillor Augustinus Tebele was tasked to take note of our concerns and write a letter to Uutoni and his [land reform] counterpart Calle Schlettwein, who must then discuss our concerns.”

Tone deaf

Pienaar, who says this is his second arrest over land grabbing in nine years, pointed out that the members of his group were all Swapo members, but they defected to LPM in recent times because of the ruling party’s tone-deaf stance on land.

“There’s no Swapo leader in the region that we have not contacted in our struggle for land. Not one. But none has offered us any solutions to our problems.”

Schlettwein, whom the invaders are accusing of lacking understanding of black people’s landlessness, said the invasion is illegal and the government will take legal action against the farmers.

"The farm is government property and can only be occupied by following legal procedure. Anything else is not tolerated," Schlettwein said.

In response to a January letter by the head of LPM’s human rights department, Joyce Muzengua, on the same matter, Schlettwein said Farm Witsand has been earmarked for people relocating to Namibia from Botswana, where hordes of Ovaherero people fled to escape German genocide between 1904 and 1908.

Witsand has been uninhabited for the past four years, while many farmers in the Omaheke Region have applied for relocation in vain.

Members of disadvantaged San communities also roam the corridors of that region with their animals, with nowhere to go.