The Ministry of Agriculture, Water, and Land Reform will not tolerate illegal fencing of communal land.

The Director for Resettlement and Program Implementation, Alfred Sikopo, says the Ministry has full support from the traditional authorities to remove fences found to be illegal.

The National Youth Service was contracted to remove these fences, which are mostly located in the Uukwangali Traditional Authority's jurisdiction.

Sikopo warned owners of illegal fences to remove them as soon as they are notified, or the ministry would do so at a cost to those who set them up.

"So we have hired the NYS to come and remove a total of nine fences that were found to be illegal in Kavango West, which makes about 81 km in total for all the fences. They've been hired, and they'll be here for the next three weeks, removing fences one by one until they're all gone."

The ministry, he says, is working with the Kavango West and Ohangwena regions, where altogether ten fences are to be removed.

Sikopo called on other regional land boards to work with the ministry to address the issue of illegal fencing.

"However, the communal land board continues to investigate, even right now, there is a team that is going to investigate some of these fences starting next week, so we believe that in the next month we will receive reports on many fences found to be illegal in some of the areas, so they are all over the traditional authorities...OUT."

The operation was launched in the Ncamagoro Constituency, under the Mbunza Traditional Authority's jurisdiction, where an illegal fence erected inside a two-thousand-hectare small-scale farming unit was dismantled.