LAND REFORM: HOW SERIOUS ARE WE?

Namibia cannot measure land reform by hectares acquired. The real test is whether the people who receive land can make a living from it.

There is a question Namibia has avoided for too long: How serious are we about land reform?

Not how seriously do we talk about it.

Not how many farms have we purchased.

Not how many beneficiaries have been announced.

Not how many hectares have been redistributed.

The harder question is: how effective are the measures we have put in place to make land reform work?

The latest revelations about Agribank should force this question back onto the national agenda.

Agribank is lending more than N$250 million a year while receiving an average of only about N$99 million annually in Treasury support, according to figures presented to Parliament by Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Land Reform Minister Inge Zaamwani. The resulting difference of roughly N$151 million is not, by itself, an officially declared funding deficit. But it tells us something important: the institution expected to help finance agriculture and land reform is itself having to depend heavily on the capital market to sustain its lending programme.

That should concern us.

Agribank is not an ordinary commercial bank. Its developmental purpose matters.

Namibia created institutions and schemes precisely because the ordinary market could not be expected to correct the historical inequalities in land ownership and agricultural opportunity by itself.

The Affirmative Action Loan Scheme was established to help previously disadvantaged Namibians acquire commercial agricultural land. Agribank describes it as an important component of the land reform programme.

But land acquisition is only the beginning.

A farmer can be given land and still fail.

A title or lease does not put water into a borehole. It does not erect a fence. It does not buy livestock. It does not repair a tractor. It does not build a kraal. It does not create a market. It does not provide agricultural expertise.

And it certainly does not guarantee that a farm will become productive.

This is where Namibia’s land reform debate needs to mature.

For years, the national conversation has been dominated by how much land has been acquired and who has received it.

We should now be asking what happens afterwards.

How many beneficiaries are producing?

How many farms are commercially viable?

How many have access to water?

How many have adequate infrastructure?

How many are carrying unsustainable debt?

How many have received extension services and business support?

How many have failed, and why?

How many farms have been repossessed?

And how much public money has been spent per successful, productive beneficiary?

These are not hostile questions.

They are the questions of accountability.

Indeed, Agribank’s own programmes acknowledge that land reform requires more than land. Its Post Settlement Support Fund provides concessional financing to resettled farmers for crops, livestock, machinery and infrastructure.

But a 2025 University of Namibia study examining the fund’s impact on women beneficiaries in Oshikoto found that the majority of beneficiaries studied had not experienced significant improvements in agricultural productivity, citing challenges including insufficient agricultural training and inadequate infrastructure such as water and fencing.

That finding should not be dismissed.

Nor should it automatically be generalised to every resettled farmer in Namibia.

But it should compel government to ask whether the system is producing the outcomes it was designed to produce.

Because land reform that produces beneficiaries without productive farmers is incomplete land reform.

And land reform that leaves beneficiaries with land but without the means to develop it risks creating a cycle of frustration, indebtedness and dependency.

This brings us directly back to Agribank.

If Agribank has to borrow at prime or near-prime rates and then lend to farmers at substantially lower rates, government must be clear about the financial model underpinning this developmental mandate.

How much subsidisation is required?

Who ultimately carries the cost?

What is the acceptable level of non-performing loans?

What happens when developmental objectives collide with the bank’s obligation to remain financially sustainable?

These are not questions to be answered after another agricultural crisis.

They must be answered now.

The concerns become even more urgent because Agribank has faced criticism over farm repossessions. In January 2026, the Previously Disadvantaged Namibian Farmers’ Union called for a halt to repossessions and argued that some land reform beneficiaries were being subjected to commercial lending conditions. Agribank, for its part, has said its mandate is to empower farmers and that repossession is a legal remedy after loan defaults and reasonable collection efforts have been exhausted.

There is a legitimate policy tension here.

A development bank must protect public money and recover loans.

But land reform must also protect the developmental purpose for which those loans were created.

The answer cannot be to pretend that repayment does not matter.

Nor can it be to treat every struggling land reform beneficiary as though he or she were simply another commercial borrower operating under normal market conditions.

The system needs to distinguish between commercial failure, climatic shocks, inadequate infrastructure, poor management and structural weaknesses in the land reform model.

That requires data.

It requires transparency.

And it requires political courage.

We should also ask whether the country’s current funding arrangements are commensurate with the ambition of land reform.

The state cannot announce land reform as a national priority while expecting Agribank to finance an expanding developmental mandate largely through borrowed money.

If affordable agricultural finance is a national policy objective, government must decide what level of fiscal support it is prepared to provide.

And if government cannot provide that support, then it must be honest about the scale and pace of the programme it can sustainably fund.

The same principle applies to land acquisition itself.

The National Planning Commission’s review records that AALS had, according to Agribank data, disbursed approximately N$310 million to 158 beneficiaries for the acquisition of more than 705,000 hectares between its introduction and 2021.

Those numbers sound impressive.

But hectares do not eat.

People do.

Livestock do.

Factories, schools and hospitals employ people.

A farm’s value ultimately lies not only in who owns it, but in what it produces and the livelihoods it creates.

That is why Namibia needs a land reform performance framework.

Every major land reform programme should publish annual results.

Not propaganda.

Results.

Land acquired.

Beneficiaries settled.

Capital invested.

Infrastructure provided.

Production achieved.

Jobs created.

Loan repayment rates.

Farm failures.

Repossession rates.

Household incomes.

Food produced.

And the amount of additional public money required to keep each programme functioning.

Only then can Parliament and the public determine whether the billions invested in land reform are achieving their intended purpose.

The political question of land remains important.

The economic question is equally important.

And the human question is perhaps the most important of all.

What happens to a Namibian who waits years for land, finally receives it, and then discovers that the state has effectively finished its job at the moment the real work begins?

That cannot be the meaning of land reform.

We must stop measuring success at the point of allocation.

The real test begins after the keys are handed over.

If the farm becomes productive, employs people, supports a family, contributes to food security and survives beyond the original beneficiary, then land reform has created an economic asset.

If it becomes indebted, underdeveloped, unproductive and eventually repossessed, then Namibia must have the courage to ask what went wrong.

The answer will not always be the farmer.

Sometimes it may be the system.

And that is the uncomfortable question we should now confront.

How serious are we about land reform and how effective are the measures we have put in place to make it work?

Until we are prepared to measure the answer honestly, we will continue confusing the redistribution of land with the transformation of lives.

Namibia deserves better.

And so do the people who were promised that land reform would change their economic future.