KEETMANSHOOP: About 70 inhabitants of the ||Kharas Region are attending a two-day consultative meeting on the review of the resettlement criteria under the Resettlement Policy of 2023.
Officiating the meeting, ||Kharas Governor Aletha Frederick urged the stakeholders to come up with criteria that will ensure that previously disadvantaged Namibians who were socially, economically or educationally underprivileged under previous discriminatory laws and practices, are catered for.
‘Let us develop criteria which ensure land redistribution following the pattern of different value models will be a success. Our collective input in this discourse will ensure successful and peaceful land reform in our country,’ Frederick said.
She added that the participants should also ensure that the criteria they propose cater for dispossessed communities, youth, and women, marginalised groups, and generational farm workers, and productive communal farmers.
One of the participants, Ulrich Dawids, said government should look at w
ays to monitor those resettled if they are using the farms for the intended purposes.
‘I think there should be measures put in place to ensure that people who get resettled use the farms for the right purposes. The enforcement arm of government is absent in this area. On the other hand, the hectares that are proposed are too little. If a farm is less than 5 000 hectares then it’s nothing, you cannot do much on it,’ he stressed.
Another participant, Ignatius Murorua, said; ‘The two models this policy used are without any doubt designed to benefit those that are advantaged because the requirements leave many of us out. Many of us do not qualify because of those models and we want to know who comes up with these models that empower or enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.’
The meeting started on Thursday and ends Friday, and is aimed at getting input from the stakeholders in regard to the resettlement criteria.
The Resettlement Policy of 2023 was approved by Cabinet early this year and is expected to be l
aunched in April this year.
Among those attending the meeting are communal and commercial farmers, traditional authority representatives, regional leadership and heads of ministries.
Source: The Namibia Press Agency
