Namibia country report

5.1.3 Settlers’ relationship with pre-settlement homesMost of the FURS beneficiaries maintained relationships with relatives and acquaintancesin communal areas or elsewhere. However, all respondents stated that they no longer hadany livestock on communal land because the risks of losing stock on communal land weretoo high.Lazarus who farmed at Skoonheid still had close ties with his relatives in the Epukirocommunal area from where he had come. One reason for this was that his son, a Windhoekbasedlawyer, was keeping a few livestock there. But Lazarus himself did not have anylivestock there, and he said that he would not consider taking his livestock there even in adrought. In his view, communal areas were no longer favourable grazing areas, not leastdue to stock theft which was rife in these areas. He said that “as soon as cattle leave yourkraal [in a communal area], they are not your cattle anymore”.5.1.4 Settlers’ social relations and networksOn many resettlement farms, social relations among beneficiaries were problematic. This ispartly due to the way that beneficiaries were selected. FURS beneficiaries did not have thebenefit of choosing their neighbours. Social issues were not considered in the land allocationprocess, therefore fate alone determined who settled next to who. Most beneficiaries on aparticular farm were not related, but rather were complete strangers at first. In addition, mosthad opted for resettlement to be able to take management decisions themselves. For them,resettlement represented the only option for leaving communal farming and communaldecision-making behind.The upshot of the above was that there was no real sense of community on most resettlementfarms. Ethnic heterogeneity did not help the process either. In and of itself this might nothave represented a problem, but it often became a problem when FURS beneficiaries hadto co-operate on crucial farming issues by force of circumstance. The most important issuerequiring co-operation was water.As resettlement farms are subdivisions of large-scale commercial farms, not all allocatedportions of land had their own borehole. It was therefore very common for beneficiaries tohave to share a borehole. In many cases this situation led to disputes. Issues of paying formaintenance, for example, gave rise to disputes because some beneficiaries watered morelivestock than others. This was the case on the farm Panorama in Hardap which had onlyone water point. It was controlled by the labourer of a part-time beneficiary with a largenumber of livestock. A recurring issue was who was responsible for repairs and maintenance.Because his neighbour had fewer animals, he wanted to pay less.One way to settle disputes over paying for the pumping of water was to require that eachbeneficiary provided his/her own diesel. On at least one farm, this solution was a departurefrom the earlier system of sharing the fuel costs. Farm Uitsicht in Hardap was allocated tothree beneficiaries but had only one borehole. Two beneficiaries had to pump water from92 ● Livelihoods after land reform: Namibia country report (2010)