The Struggle Continues: Namibia’s Enduring Land Question

With Independence in 1990, Namibia inherited a socio-economic structure that, in terms of land distribution, had anchored the colonial divide and rule under Apartheid: a white-owned commercial agricultural sector contrasted with communal areas based on regional-ethnic criteria. Constitutional principles accepted as the final step towards Independence and sovereignty excluded any expropriation without fair compensation and therefore contributed to limiting land restitution and redistribution. Since 1990, diversification has taken place in private land ownership in commercial agriculture. A growing number of black farm owners have benefitted from a redistributive land policy guided by state support for elite interests. In the communal areas, local traditional authorities and representatives of the central state administration abused control over land rights to further the privatisation of communal property in terms of its use. These land reform dimensions underlined the new pact among elites in independent Namibia in different ways and disclosed the class character of property relations and ownership related to land. But, in the absence of a coherent policy, even a neoliberal perspective and strategy is hardly visible. Government policy so far rather testifies more to the negligence of any meaningful land reform.