Farmers reject Land Board compensation guidelines

Koketso Kgoboge | Wednesday April 1, 2015 11:25

During the consultation meeting organised by Morupule Coal Mine (MCM) last week, the affected farmers noted that the compensation rates used by the Land Board are the same as the ones used for those making way for residential plots. They would rather be given special compensation.

“We are being evicted from our ploughing fields to make way for the mine, so we don’t expect to be compensated by the Land Board with their compensation rates, we should be compensated by the mine with the mine compensation rates,” said one of the farmers.

Lethogonolo Bantsi, an affected farmer at Morupule, said they have seen people being evicted and compensated on many occasions only to be subjected to life in poverty. He urged MCM to divulge a way they can help the farmers with life skills and counsel them before paying them out.

“We want to know what initiatives are in place to help us before and after compensation. We have seen people being compensated, now they live in dire poverty and some have resorted to Ipelegeng and that is not where we want to end up. We want to be helped with life skills and to be put through financial counselling before we are compensated because we don’t want to find ourselves in the bitter end of life,” he said.

Farmers told the mine and Land Board officials that when carrying out their compensations they must take into consideration the moving of their properties and also bear in mind that some of the farms affected are commercial farms. Victor Mulaladzi said they must also be compensated for their farm animals and farm implements.

“When you do your compensation assessment you must not only look at immovable property because some of us are running our daily businesses there. We expect to be compensated also for loss of business and for our implements that are not going to be useful for a period of time as we don’t know when we are going to get other land to re-establish our businesses,” he said.

For his part, the Land Board estate officer, Kewetse Marokhu, said the land always belongs to the Land Board and people are only given the right to use the land therefore people will be compensated for the loss of that right.

“You have the right to acquire land and you can still go to the Land Board to ask for other land. The government of Botswana wants to use the land that you were given and we are sent to get that land back and therefore you will be compensated for the inconvenience and the right that was given to you,” Marokhu told the farmers.

He advised that if anyone is not satisfied with the guidelines they are allowed to source property valuators to establish how much will be a fair compensation for their properties.

“Anyone of you that is affected is allowed to do his/her own valuations through private valuators, but when doing those valuations you must differentiate compensation and buying because the properties are not going to be bought but compensated for. You must also know that the idea is not to enrich or impoverish anyone but rather to make positive developments for the nation,” advised Marokhu.

He stressed that the land would be compensated as per the Land Board compensation guidelines regardless of the end use as the land does belong to the Land Board.

For MCM, the business development manager, Matthews Bagopi told the farmers that the company does not own the project but are hired by the government through the Ministry of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources (MMEWR) to mine coal and supply to an Independent Power Producer (IPP).

“This project doesn’t belong to MCM it belongs to the government, we as MCM only received an order from the MMEWR to supply the IPP with coal by the year 2018/2019 so that they can produce electricity for the nation of Botswana,” said Bagopi.