Mismanagement, corruption and politicking hold back promised allocations of land and houses in Namibia
In November 2014, a few weeks before Namibia’s presidential and parliamentary elections, three ruling party youth league activists illegally staked out and occupied a piece of land in an affluent suburb on the outskirts of the capital, Windhoek.
The three, Job Amupanda, George Kambala and Dimbulukeni Nauyoma, all young professionals with steady incomes, were protesting against steeply rising urban property and rental prices, which they said were unaffordable for many young professionals and working Namibians. The stunt was the birth of the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement, which gained immediate traction on online social media platforms. The National Planning Commission put the shortage of low-cost and affordable housing stock at somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000, but its figures were arguably outdated.
The AR activists went on to call for a mass submission of land applications to the City of Windhoek (CoW), asking for 2,000 applicants to start submitting their applications at 11am on November 21st 2014. On the day, more than 14,000 young Namibians showed up to submit applications for land, causing major traffic disruptions in the Windhoek CBD and service disruption at the CoW head office.
A subsequent AR campaign called for a countrywide mass land application on February 27th 2015; it drew more than 30,000 applicants to local authorities countrywide. During this period, which they called the “cooperative episode”, the AR activists also set the government an ultimatum, at local and national levels, to heed their calls to provide affordable land and housing, failing which a mass land grab would start nationwide on July 31st 2015.
National and local politicians of the ruling Swapo Party accused the activists of trying to undermine the administration, but the AR’s growing popularity apparently rattled the newly elected president, Hage Geingob. On July 24th, he called the AR activists to a meeting at State House, in Windhoek, at which some sort of “agreement” was reached.
AR activists claimed that the president agreed to specific actions, including that 200,000 urban residential plots around the country—a figure they admitted to have arrived at arbitrarily—would be cleared and provided with services such as […], starting in Windhoek on July 29th 2015. Much of the land around urban centres is farmland, which has to be bought, proclaimed by the local authority as urban residential property and re-zoned.
The government had not officially acknowledged the existence of this “agreement” by the time of going to press. Nonetheless, the movement had focused the spotlight on the failure of regional and local authorities to provide land for housing and commercial purposes at a speed commensurate with demand. This failure was symptomatic of poor policy and programmatic planning and implementation that stretched all the way up to central government.
According to a 2012 housing report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a Namibian think-tank, “the process of acquiring land is lengthy, time-consuming and has not evolved with development.” It identified capacity constraints in the form of a lack of financial resources, qualified personnel and land surveyors at local authority level. The National Housing Policy also prescribed a minimum plot size of 300 square metres, which led to lengthy re-zoning processes and delayed building, the report said.
These problems have remained largely unsolved. Following the “agreement” reached with AR, the government announced a programme of mass urban land servicing—now dubbed the Mass Urban Land Servicing Programme (MULSP). But local authorities said they had neither the budgets nor the skills to undertake such an exercise. Experts said it would take well over a decade to service 200,000 residential plots.
The AR activists had initially demanded that “a significant” number of plots be delivered by end October 2015 and the rest by end July 2016. According to the CoW, it took on average two years to deliver a serviced plot to market. The period varied according to the size and topography of the area earmarked for development.
To be fair, the Namibian government has long attempted to deliver serviced land in bulk. In the early 1990s it set up a new state agency, the National Housing Enterprise (NHE), to roll out affordable housing in collaboration with local authorities. The NHE ‘s target was to deliver 1,200 serviced houses each year, but it has averaged roughly 300. In its best year, 2002, it managed to deliver about 600.
At about the same time, the government also initiated the Build Together Programme, a low-cost housing financing scheme to be funded by central government but administered by local authorities. But the programme was beset by corruption, nepotism and mismanagement and to date no proper accounting has been carried out. The scheme was effectively folded into the now-stalled Mass Housing Scheme in late 2013.
The same severe underperformance characterised the government’s two grand schemes since 2010—the Targeted Intervention Programme for Employment and Economic Growth (TIPEEG), a three-year initiative that ran from 2011/12 to 2013/14, and the Mass Housing Scheme launched in November 2013, set to run until 2030, but now suspended.
Under TIPEEG authorities were to deliver 3,980 newly serviced plots and 4,521 low-cost houses in urban settlements around the country. Since the end of the programme in 2014 it has become clear that neither target came close to being met. Only a few hundred houses were built, but exact figure is not known as the government has withheld specific data.
The Mass Housing Scheme, which was to be implemented by local authorities in partnership with the NHE, was supposed to deliver 185,000 housing units, including 8,800 affordable houses and 10,200 serviced plots in the first phase running to the end of the first quarter of 2016. However, it was suspended over alleged mismanagement and corrupt contracting in early 2015, with only about 1,200 houses completed. The servicing of plots had stalled, and the money had dried up as the cost of the scheme skyrocketed. As with TIPEEG, no specific figures have been made public.
In an apparent attempt to deflect criticism of ruling party-controlled local authorities, the Geingob administration resorted to blaming foreign ownership of urban land and housing for the spike in property prices, especially in the capital. Amendments to the Regional Councils Act and the Local Authorities Act that outlawed foreign ownership of all land in urban areas were introduced in Parliament in mid-October 2015.
An assessment by the IPPR concluded that foreign ownership of land and real estate in Namibia was insignificant. “The prohibition against foreigners buying commercial properties has raised alarm in parts of the private sector. Restrictive property legislation such as proposed might discourage foreign investors from coming to Namibia,” the report said.
Some 32 amendments and changes to the Local Authorities Act were proposed. One of them, Section 33 (A) subsection 3, created strictly class-based residential zones, the report said. “The potential benefits of this provision…are dwarfed by its negative implications, however,” it concluded. “Urban areas are already marked by a severe level of segregation according to economic status, largely a legacy of apartheid. This provision…could legally “ghettoize” poorer areas of cities and condemn them to perpetual underdevelopment…while property in affluent areas would only rise in value.”
Other critics, including some in national government, had similar misgivings. The deputy minister of agriculture, Anna Shiweda, said the provisions of Section 33 (A) were “socially terrifying”. While the Local Authorities Amendment Bill was being discussed in parliament, Leonard Jona, the president of the Association of Local Authorities in Namibia (ALAN) and CEO of the southern coastal town of was quoted as saying that no consultations had been held with local authorities, and that he could not say whether the amendments to the bill addressed all the issues raised.
Mr Jona added that the amendments to the Local Authorities Act undermined the government’s decentralisation policy, as they effectively centralised decision-making at national level. Despite these objections, the amendments sailed through parliament in October 2015.
In his mid-year budget review statement in November 2015 Finance Minister Calle Schlettwein announced deep cuts across government expenditure through to 2018. However, he added that immediate cuts had freed up about N$121m (about $9m) to be re-allocated to land servicing.
The three AR activists had succeeded in bringing the land issue to national attention. Interestingly, just a day before their July 24th meeting with the president, the ruling party’s Politburo announced that they had been expelled from the party, along with former Swapo Party Youth League (SPYL) Secretary, Elijah Ngurare. The four had been found guilty on vague charges of ill-discipline and misbehaviour. They are currently challenging their expulsion in the High Court of Namibia.
Meanwhile, informants in the real estate sector, who did not want to be identified, say the price of land—and therefore of residential property—is likely to remain high in key Namibian urban areas. In June 2015, Namibia recorded the second highest house price increase internationally after Dubai, according to the FNB Namibia House Price Index.
The government’s failure to substantially tackle the structural issues at local level may contribute to an aggressive resurfacing of the AR movement, which went relatively quiet in late 2015 and into the beginning of 2016. The extent of the Geingob administration’s commitment to land reform will be seen in the 2016/17 national budget, traditionally released between late February and early March.
