John Mendelsohn
I hope that 2026 will see a good deal of reasoned debate and discussion in parliament. Indeed, an abundance of sensible ideas and sound facts are needed if new legislation is to resolve the multiple messes in which so much Namibian land now finds itself.
Some of the questions and uncertainties about the purpose and value of land emerged in an interesting opinion by Lazarus Jacobs in the Windhoek Observer on 15 December 2025. The article – entitled The village has died. Long live the village – described some of the changes and agonies that now surround rural villages in Namibia. On the one hand, villages appear to be dying, their apparent subsistence purpose and members now gone for much of the time. With this decay underway, is there any reason to invest in rural villages, or even to hope for their future?
And yet many urban residents retain and strongly defend their village roots and families, often to the extent of building modern homes, keeping livestock and having their children raised by kin in their home villages.
These paradoxes raise questions about the value and purpose of villages. How is it possible to retain strong ties with defunct institutions if most economic and daily life is now concentrated in distant towns? What ties multi-millionaires resident in Ludwigsdorf to remote dusty clusters of huts?
The answer I believe comes from the economic value of villages. Not the revenue or production on which most economics focuses, but on the capital supplied by villages. And again not the simple sort of wealth with which we normally associate the term, but capital in its broadest and most valuable sense, which reflects the value of capital in providing for security, resilience, options, savings, investments, opportunities, connections and remittances.
These are the fundamental values provided by capital to rural villages and communities of kin. The values are not bankable, and seldom are they formally described, registered or analysed, even by academics. But as much as families are fused by relationships, so too are they bonded by their capital resources.
This kind of capital is a good thing, and its traditional manifestation in sustaining village families is extremely valuable. The sooner villages are recognized and protected as legal entities with defined borders the better. That will bring to an end the widespread dispossession of people from rural land by traditional leaders since 1990 who have used their political status to enrich themselves. The formal recognition of villages and their resources will bring security and encourage the sort of investment that your article called for. Long live the village!
John Mendelsohn is a Namibian scientist who studies biology, geography and informal livelihoods. These disciplines offer much to ponder, fascinate and understand.
