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FEATURE: ‘Let Others Taste What We Have Tasted’

Posted in: Faith in Action, Featured, Features

Bertha Hamases used the basic income grant to find work and regain her financial footing. © LWF/Dirk Haarmann

Basic Income Grant Transforms Desperate Namibian Village into Place of Hope

WINDHOEK, Namibia /GENEVA, 8 March 2011 (LWI) – Bertha Hamases is a tall woman with a weathered face and a friendly sparkle in her eyes. A few years ago she was one of the many people circling the drain in Otjivero, a dead-end settlement 100 kilometers from Namibia’s capital Windhoek.

Here evicted farm workers gathered in misery. For Hamases, 32, a single parent with four children aged between nine and 16, life looked hopeless, until a coalition of civil society organizations picked Otjivero for a privately-funded pilot project to show that a universal basic income grant (BIG) could make all the difference.

She came to Otjivero eight years ago. Before that she had been living on a farm, but she fell out with her partner and had to leave, taking her four children along. “Life was hard, we were suffering. The children would go to school, but I didn’t have money for the school fees. Because they were hungry the children couldn’t concentrate on their homework and it showed in their studies. The school would keep asking for money,” she recalls.

Once a month Hamases would travel to Windhoek and beg money from relatives, which she would use to buy a little food for her children. “We lived in a small one-room ‘kambashu,’ an iron corrugated shack. I would do nothing all day, maybe visit some neighbors and see what they could spare for me.”

Life in Otjivero as a whole was tough. Every second day people arrived after being chased away from the neighboring farms. There was crime because people didn’t have money to buy food. Poaching from the farms was a big problem. There was prostitution, violence against women and a lot of alcoholism. The small settlement had around five or six shebeens (informal bars).

500 Namibian Dollars

Then in 2008, the BIG project started. “Because there were five of us, the four children and I, all of a sudden, we received 500 Namibian dollars (around USD 73) a month,” she says.

The grant enabled Hamases to find a job. For two months she remained in Otjivero, saving up money. Then she used the BIG money to travel to Windhoek, where she placed an advertisement in the newspaper offering her services as a domestic worker. After two days she was offered a job, and now earns NAD 1,000 (USD 145) per month plus housing and food. She travels home to Otjivero twice a month.

“The BIG didn’t stop because I worked elsewhere. That’s to show that the grant can create opportunities. Everyone that originally qualified still receives the money,” Hamases remarks.

Although after the pilot project ended the grant was lowered to NAD 80 dollars (USD 12) per head, her total monthly income of NAD 1,400 (USD 204) makes it possible for her to pay school fees buy uniforms and other costs for children.

“The beautiful thing is that last year they all passed. I can also pay the bills at the clinic, so the nurses don’t have to confiscate my clinic card anymore. I also use the money to buy shoes, clothes and other goods in Windhoek and then sell them in Otjivero on the weekends. My profit is usually around NAD 400 (USD 56),” says Hamses.

She has extended the one-room shack into a three-roomed house “and God willing I will soon start a soup kitchen for the elderly and orphans,” she adds.

Many Changes

Hamses describes the many changes in Otjivero. “The children all buy school uniforms and parents pay the school fees. People buy food and purchase TVs, DVD-players and stoves. Many have extended their houses. Where there were few shops before, now there are 10-12 little shops. The place is much cleaner because people don’t mind cleaning when they are fed and not hungry. Crime has stopped totally, while alcoholism and the beating of women has become much less. There was prostitution because women were hungry, but that has stopped completely.”

She says the only problem is that the settlement has become an attractive place to which to migrate. “Even people from Windhoek are coming because they think there is money in Otjivero,” Hamses adds.

She has something to say to politicians who criticize the project, saying the BIG would create laziness and dependence among Namibia’s poor. “Well, I didn’t use to work before the BIG, but now I am working. I used the money to advertise myself and found work. Other ladies in Otjivero also gave me money to place an advertisement in the newspaper for them and now they also work. I am really proud that I receive the basic income grant and it should be continued in the whole country, so we can stop poverty in Namibia. So that others can taste what we have tasted,” Hamses concludes.

Facts Belie Criticism

According to the National Planning Commission, over 70 percent of Namibia’s 1.8 million people live on less than USD 1.50 per day, in an economy dependent on abundant mineral resources, yet known to have one of the highest income inequality rates in the world.

It is against this background that a broad-based civil society coalition including churches was formed in April 2005 to advocate the implementation of a basic income grant for all Namibians below pensionable age. A government-appointed tax commission in 2002 had proposed such a grant.

Led by Bishop Dr Zephania Kameeta of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia (ELCRN), the coalition lobbies government to implement such a grant, while leading by example. Its members raised funds to facilitate the grant payout in Otjivero. They also document the implications of income security for poverty reduction and economic development.

Between January 2008 and December 2009, the BIG coalition had paid out more than NAD 2.2 million (over USD 324,000) to the 930 inhabitants of Otjivero. The NAD 80 paid out per head as a bridging allowance for 14 months amounts to more than NAD 1 million (over USD 151,000).

The BIG coalition provides facts that belie criticism about the viability of the basic income grant. Between 2008 and 2009 the unemployment rate in Otjivero dropped from 60 to 40 percent; food poverty dropped from 72 to 16 percent; self-employment increased by 300 percent; school dropout rates reduced from almost 40 percent to zero; child malnutrition dropped from 42 to 10 percent; and the health clinic reports four to six times more income because people can pay for the services.

Responding to a presentation this February in Windhoek by visiting Brazilian Senator Matarazzo Suplicy, the ELCRN bishop said the BIG coalition started the Otjivero pilot project “because words and debate have not succeeded,” and because “the opponents always argued by saying: ‘But it has never been done anywhere in world, how do you know that it is working?’”

Kameeta pointed out that the Otjivero community has “shown the world how the BIG and the will of the people have transformed a poor, desolated, desperate village without hope into a place where people not only have enough to feed and clothe themselves and their children, but also to send them to school and pay their contribution, to go to the clinic and pay the modest fee.”

They have taken this money and multiplied it within the community through small businesses and economic activities, turning Otjvero into “a place of confidence and hope not only for Namibia but for the whole world,” added Kameeta.

The ELCRN is one of the three member churches of The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) in Namibia. Kameeta is a member of the LWF Council. (1,280 words)

The story about Bertha Hamses was adapted with permission from Inter Press Service (IPS) and Servaas van den Bosch. Additional information about BIG is from LWI sources.

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