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The Homaning community plans to hold a peaceful demonstration on September 20 to petition the government to address their land claims.
Walter Haseb and Jorro Eiseb, senior traditional councillors from the Khomanin traditional community, believe the government is engaging in targeted discrimination against the Khomanin people by denying land to their women and children despite their ancestral ties.
Unlike other traditional authorities, they believe they have been treated unfairly because the government never bought back communal land from those who had forced them off the communal land they were cultivating during the Odendaal Plan in the 1960s.
abandoned
As a result, they often have nowhere to house their families, which can lead to children ending up on the streets in order to make ends meet.
“The Khomaning people live a nomadic life. We don’t even have a place to practice our customs, traditions and norms – I think they want the traditional authority of the Khomaning to disappear,” Hasseb told the Evening Review last week.
This dire situation of street children leads to many of them being hit by cars at traffic intersections and suffering serious injuries as they have no safe shelter.
Unfortunately, some people even lost their lives in the floods in Windhoek last December.
“Most of our children live on land bought by Russian billionaires and are forcibly pushed out onto the streets. Although we try to take care of them, many end up fleeing the shelter and assistance we provide because life there is still very difficult,” said Esseb.
Unheard of
They say it is a grievance that has been going on since independence, when they first tried unsuccessfully to reclaim their land through “legal procedures”, namely engaging with senior government officials such as Calle Schlettwein.
“He knows all of our history and is very aware of the needs of the people of Homan,” Hasseb said.
They have also appealed to Khomas regional governor Laura McLeod-Katjirua. “We asked her to put it on the agenda for discussion but we never got feedback or recognition,” Hasseb said. They have also contacted the Ministry of Lands and Agriculture but their appeals have gone unanswered.
Last July, they went to State House and outlined the challenges they face as traditional authorities. They submitted a detailed 20-page document highlighting their struggles in the “concentration camps” they currently live in. Although the President has publicly commented on the issue of ancestral land, he has not been able to listen to the voices of the Damara community at his doorstep.
As a result, they find themselves unable to even access the graves of their ancestors because they are located on private land and there are court orders preventing them from entering.
exclude
When asked by the Namibian Sun if they benefited from the resettlement programme implemented by the government, Eiseb said: “My community of Homanen has not benefited from the programme at all because we lack livestock and crop farming, so filling in the resettlement forms to apply for communal land is a difficult task. Our settlement is in Aroble, which we obtained legally, but it is not completely in our hands because the municipality still owns it.”
To once again voice their grievances, the Homaning community plans to hold a peaceful demonstration, march and deliver a petition to the vice president’s office on September 20. “This is because the president instructed the vice president to pay attention to all our cries, pleas and prayers before us, but as we have mentioned, it has been a year now,” said Esib.
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