Land Affairs

Are Rights the Answer to Underdevelopment?

Are human rights universal, indivisible and equally applicable everywhere or may local contexts and local decision-making matter more in some situations? This is a hotly debated topic among policy makers and development practitioners. In my country, Denmark, it is currently up for debate because the new Minister for Development Cooperation, Christian Friis Bach, wants to reform Danish development assistance, introducing Human Rights-Based Approaches. That has met resistance from some scholars and in the development community. Typically, the minister’s insistence on a set of values defined in the North is seen as neo-colonialism. Furthermore, it is argued, the approach is unlikely to work. You can read a recent example of the critique on this newly established blog, The Political Economy of the Development in Africa.

I experienced a similar discrepancy between high principles and local priorities first hand a couple of years ago when I visited remote villages, in which NGOs worked to secure women’s rights to land. The women usually appreciated the support of the NGOs. But then they raised the question: Now what? What is the use of land ownership if we have no money to buy seeds? What is the use of a title deed if roads are shoddy and we can not transport our crops to town?

Dorothy L. Hodgson, in the anthology Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights explores similar dilemmas about the potential and the limitations of the “women’s rights as human rights” framework. In her chapter, These are not our Priorities: Maasai Women, Human Rights and the Problem of Culture, she describes the dilemmas Maasai women activists in Tanzania face when they do fundraising. Western donors and Tanzanian elite groups, based in the cities, typically offer funds for the fight against female genital modification (FGM). The Maasai activists know, however, that if FGM is the main thing on their agenda when they visit Maasai villages, they are unlikely to achieve anything. Instead, they deem support for girl’s education and income generating activities more important. Things which can make women better able to make their own decisions. The activists do not defend female genital modification. But they believe they can achieve more, also in the fight against FGM, using other means.

A colleague of mine has termed the dilemma between high principles and what works on the ground ‘a conflict between the human rights people and the development practitioners’. The disagreement is over means more than over ends. Both groups see a great value in human rights. The question is how to get there. Maybe, the development practitioners suggest, when resources are scarce – and they are in most developing countries – they should be used for what works. And what works may not always be the rights based approaches. It is a dilemma, is it not?

Land Reform. But for Whom? (2)

Sometimes I find books on land and land reforms - new books - which have an air of another era about them. The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry is such a book. It is not without insights. But its language and concepts feel more like revolutionary literature from the 1970s than like academic analysis from this millennium.

The book’s part one, written by Utsa Patnaik, addresses the theoretical failure in understanding the links between the agenda of finance capital, on the one hand, and the agrarian crisis in developing countries, on the other (p. 9). Agrarian crises is a classic Marxist topic and the term describes how capitalism dispossesses the small-scale producers of their land.

Personally, I find it honorable when scholars are preoccupied with the rural poor - the peasantry as Utsa Patnaik phrases it. And the author has some extremely interesting findings.  For instance, she shows that populations in developing countries have experienced a decline in grain availability. That is extremely worrying.

What bothers me a bit about Utsa Patnaik’s contribution, however, is its tendency to focus on the negative outcomes of development only. The approach appears rather eclectic. For instance, she writes that cereal output per capita fell sharply in China in the period 1990-2003 and that that the food availability for the poorer mass has declined sharply.

Utsa Patnaik does not, however, discuss why her findings differ from most current descriptions of China, according to which living standards are rising and hundreds of millions are being lifted out of poverty. FAO statistics, furthermore, according this chart, shows a rising calories per person intake in China in the same period. Why do Utsa Patnaik’s findings differ from such, more general, analyses? Is it because of her narrow focus on grain production, which seems to exclude other crops? Or is it because of the uneven distribution of wealth in the country? She does not tell us.

Similarly, she has a statistic showing the decline in per day capita intake in a number of African countries from 1979 to 1991. That is the period of structural reform programmes, which endeniably reduced food security for people in a number of countries in sub-Saharan. She does not, however, include the subsequent decades which, again according to the chart based on FAO statistics, show a rising caloies intake in some of the same countries. Why has she chosen one decade and left out others? Such questions are left unanswered.

The second part, written by Sam Moyo, is not much different. It is an analysis of the third wave of land alienation in all the African regions (p. 73), that is, of the current land grabbing phenomenon. This third wave, he writes, follows the first wave colonial era land dispossessions and the second wave domestic capitalist land grabbing in numerous countries, facilitated by the new land reform policies of the 1990s (p. 68). Again, the approach is rather eclectic. For instance, I find it strange that the state nationalization programmes pursued by some governments in the 1970s, which dispossessed quite a few people of their land – Tanzania being one of them as I have described in a previous blog post – are not seen as land alienation.

What really bothers me, however, is Sam Moyo’s description of Zimbabwe’s land reform as a role model for others to follow: The agrarian accumulation model continues to be based on an outward-looking agricultural strategy, except in Zimbabwe, which is veering towards internal markets, food sovereignty and autonomous development (p. 74). He thus completely ignores the hundreds of thousands who lost their jobs in the farming sector, the 1,5 million people - a tenth of the entire Zimbabwean population – who left for South Africa, and the fact that Zimbabwe - once a breadbasket in Southern Africa - today suffers from acute food insecurity, according to this article from the World Food Programme.

I agree that land in Zimbabwe was highly unevenly distributed and that redistribution was needed. However, as the political scientist Max Weber pointed out in his ethics of responsibility, political actions should not only be measured on their intentions. First and foremost, political actions should be measured on their consequences. By most measures, President Mugabe’s reform approach was misconceived and it failed.

Issa Shivji, in the introduction to the book, writes about the latest phase of capitalist accumulation and the choice humankind faces. We have to choose, he writes, between socialism and barbarism. If only things were that simple.

Land Reform for whom?

In this weekend’s by-election in Arumeru-East, which Tanzania’s ruling party, CCM, lost to Chadema, land reform suddenly became part of the agenda. According to an article in the East African, representatives from both parties, including the winning Joshua Nasari, pledged that they would redistribute land in the area.

A newly-elected MP can hardly expect to push through a land reform on his own. Neither can even quite powerful politicians, in the short run at least. Land ownership is well protected by Tanzania’s land laws. And with good reason. Land redistribution carried out hastily and without compensating the ones loosing the land may scare the investors that Tanzania has worked so hard to attract in the last couple of decades.

I do not know much about the history of land in the Mount Meru area. But I do know that it is of utmost importance to make a well-designed programme before embarking on such a project. Without a proper plan, redistributive reform may do more harm than good. The experience from Zimbabwe shows us.
Zimbabwe, after its liberation from white minority rule in 1979-80, carried out a redistributive land reform. Land distribution was highly skewed and reform was needed. Back then, the reform was largely based on the willing seller/buyer principle and without the use of force that came to characterise the reform of the 2000s. The pace was extremely slow.

The first Zimbabwean plan aimed at the resettlement of landless people. The aim, according to the book ‘Gender and Land Reform: The Zimbabwean Experience’ by Allison Goebel, was clearly a fairer distribution of land. But that agenda changed in the last half of the 1980s. Principles eroded. Slowly, reform became a question of indigenisation, not of redistribution:

...commercial agriculture (and by implication the land allocation issue) entered the ‘indigenisation’ discourse. Indigenisation simply means the shifting of control of key aspects of the economy from white to black hands, and thus the interests of the rural poor were sidelined in favour of those of large-scale black farmers... (Bratton and Nkale according to Goebel 2005: 20).

If you are an old-fashioned nationalist, the change of ownership, from white to black, may be desirable in itself. If you wish to give the poor a bigger share of national wealth, on the other hand, you should think twice before entering the Zimbabwean land reform path. In Zimbabwe, the cake got smaller. Capital started fleeing the country and jobs disappeared. Most people got less.

Nyerere, Operation Vijiji and Violent Land Administration

I am always cautious when I write about Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere. When you are dealing with people in the same league as saints - there are people in Tanzania working for Nyerere’s beatification - you better tread carefully. People are feeling strongly about him and you may easily be misunderstood. In that way Nyerere is a bit like Jesus. You are not supposed to criticise him. And, you can find quotes by him to support almost any point of view you can think off.

In this blog post, I do not aim at criticising Nyerere. But I would like to shed some light on an aspect of the big politicians’ oeuvre that most Tanzanians’ prefer to forget: Operation Vijiji. The ambivalence most Tanzanians feel towards this grand project of social engineering of his is reflected - involuntarily - in Professor Issa Shivji’s article The village in Mwalimu Nyerere's thought. In the article from 2009, Shivji manages, on the one hand, to praise the ruling party, the government and Nyerere for the ‘tremendous achievement’ in carrying out villagisation and, on the other, to blame an American, capitalist consultancy firm, MacKinsey, for villagisation’s failure. Tellingly, Shivji prefers discussing the vision behind Operation Vijiji and ignoring its fatal consequences.

Operation Vijiji has received surprisingly little academic attention. I have only found a few academic articles analysing aspects of these villagisation processes of the 1960s and 1970s, and, so far, no larger, authoritative account of the whole period. That is a shame. The project shaped the Tanzanian countryside in unforeseen ways. During my research in the rural areas, I have met people whose houses were burnt and who were forced to move during villagisation. Some people still have ‘sleeping’ claims on the land they, or their parents, lost back then. The effects of Operation Vijiji, in other words, are still felt today.

One of the articles I have come across is Tanzania’s Operation Vijiji and Local Ecological Consciousness by Yusufu Qwaray Lawi, who analyses its implementation in Iraqland in Northern Tanzania. Interestingly, he describes how villagisation met widespread resistance, often based on local knowledge about the ecology of the area. People knew that some places were unfit for settlement. But the bureaucrats did not listen and resorted to the use of force to make people comply. Sometimes people were even told to relocate to sacred places or ancient burial grounds.

A similar scathing critique is delivered by Leander Schneider in Freedom and Unfreedom in Rural Development. He focuses on the role of Nyerere. And whereas there has been a tendency to excuse Nyerere and blame the bureaucrats for the use of force, Schneider is unrelenting. He traces Nyerere as a driving force, increasingly impatient with the peasants’ lack of enthusiasm for his ideas about ‘participatory’ development in the Ujamaa Villages. In 1972-3, apparently, the President gave up voluntarism as a guiding principle when he declared that the stage of explaining and persuading…is really ending everywhere (p. 363). The same year, after a party conference he stated that The issue of living in Ujamaa villages is now an order (p. 371). Nyerere also put immense pressure on the bureaucracy and did not hesitate removing his local representatives, the Regional and Area Commissioners, if they did not deliver on villagisation (p. 367). Nyerere was a paradox, Schneider concludes: …villagisation reveals that the President was central in driving rural development into increasingly coercive directions, which, at other times, he so forcefully spoke out against (p. 347).

There is no doubt that Nyerere made priceless contributions to the peaceful development of Tanzania. People in neighbouring countries envy the Tanzanians for that. I am also convinced that his zeal for improving the livelihoods of the rural poor, who made up the majority of the population, was genuine. To acknowledge the more problematic sides of his presidency, outlined above, does not make Nyerere a less important president. All politicians make mistakes. But it may make him more human.

Photo from http://www.dsctanzania.org/images/Nyerere.jpg

Traditional Authorities: Do they Deliver Justice in Land Disputes?

The District Land and Housing Tribunal in Tanga.

Policy makers in developing countries face difficult choices when it comes to designing court institutions for settling land disputes. On the one hand, the state court systems are often overburdened with cases. They are often also too expensive to access for most citizens, in particular for women. In other words, to increase the number of courts and reducing the fees may not be a real option in cash-strapped countries with poor populations. Different approaches are required. However, the alternatives may be easier to access, but they often have other unintended consequences.

I was reminded about the dilemma when I read the article Government must consult rural women on the Traditional Court Bill, which criticises the South African government’s decision to vest responsibility over land disputes in customary authorities. A similar critique is raised in the book Land, Power and Custom: Controversies Generated by South Africa's Communal Land Rights Act by Aninka Claassens and Ben Cousins. It describes the customary authorities as being patriarchal and criticizes them for drawing on a repertoire of practices that discriminate against women. Another scholar, Richard Crook, based on his research in Ghana, also warns us against the romanticisation of traditional or customary institutions in his conference paper The state and local justice in Ghana: hybridity, legitimacy and popular values.

In Tanzania, the government in the 1999 Village Land Act and the 2002 Courts (Land Disputes Settlements) Act chose a middle way, prescribing the establishment of village land councils made up, not of professionals, but of appointed laymen and women. The acts also recognized the role of traditional authorities in settling land disputes, but prohibited all gender-discriminatory practices. In theory, these laws and regulations are sound and pragmatic. What the authorities do in practice, however, may be a different matter.

Land Administration: the Colonial Legacy



One of the most exciting books I have read in the last year is The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen. On four hundred pages they analyse the German colonisation of the then German South-West Africa, now Namibia. It is a shocking read. The brutality towards the native population was extreme. The land was the prize the Germans wanted. By then, all the big European countries saw Africa as an empty continent with plenty of Lebensraum for entrepreneurial men and women. And Germany, in particular, was overcrowded, it was thought.

The book convincingly analyses how the technologies of the KZ death camps, the racial state and the war of annihilation - the techniques the Europeans came to know from the German expansion in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, which is seen by the authors as the greatest colonial war in history - had been developed and tested in the colonies in Africa decades earlier.

After the German wars in Namibia in the early 1900s only around sixteen thousand out of eighty thousand Herero remained (p. 230). And only thirteen thousand out of around twenty thousand Nama had survived. At the end, from a total of 57 million hectares of land, 2 million were set aside for the natives.

The book about the German genocide in Namibia made me think of Tanzania, which is the country I do most of my research in, in a different way. Until then, naively, I had bought into the story of Tanzania as a largely peaceful country with a largely peaceful history. I do not know where that tale comes from, but it is not true. It never was. Maybe the violence was less ruthless in Tanzania compared to Namibia and the settler colonies Kenya and Zimbabwe, but it was violence none the less.

One of the books about Tanzania’s history I have read subsequently is To Devour the Land of Mkwawa: Colonial Violence and the German-Hehe War in East Africa 1884-1914 by David Pizzo. It explores the German encounters with the strongest political entity in East Africa in the 1890s; the Uhehe. The encounters ended up in a total war. Again, the civilians paid the prize. In their attempts to cut off the support and supplies the population could provide the Hehe Chief, the Germans encamped the civilian population and followed a scorched earth tactics in which everything – villages and crops - was destroyed. The area around the Hehe capital, Kalenga, having been depopulated during the war, became a centre for European settlers. Today, it is known as the Iringa Highlands.

And so a number of rebellions shaped land ownership in Tanzania. In 1888 there was the ‘Arab Revolt’ along the coast. In 1890 the Maasai revolted. In 1905, the Maji Maji Revolt broke out in Southern Tanzania, when the tribes formerly allied with the colonial authorities, rebelled. This time the Wahehe were on the German side. 2-300,000 were killed. The First World War was no less devastating, according to another scholar, Jan-Bart Gewald in his working paper Colonial Warfare: Hehe and World War One, the Wars besides Maji Maji in South-Western Tanzania.

There has been a tendency to describe many of these atrocities as German phenomena. According to David Pizzo, however, that would be a mistake. His argues that the violence is part of colonialism as a system of exploitation. The famous Polish-British author Joseph Conrad were of a similar opinion. Though his Heart of Darkness has been read as a description of the Belgians’ genocidal behaviour in Congo, he describes the Belgian Colonel Kurtz like a European character, not a Belgian one: His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz... (p. 135).

The point is that land and violence in the colonies were narrowly intertwined. You can not understand these countries today without knowing that history. Personally, I keep wondering whether there is some kind of connection between Operation Vijiji – Tanzania’s forced villagisation programme in the 1970s – and these colonial precedents. And I keep wondering how long it will take before the mindset – that people can be moved around at will – disappears.

Decoupled Land Reform Implementation in Tanzania

This week I published an article in the Journal of Development Studies. It analyses the slow and eneven implementation of Tanzania’s of new-wave land reform today, more than ten years after its introduction in 1999. I argue that implementation is characterised by decoupling, involving a lack of coherence and of mechanisms of enforcement. It can be observed at all levels within the land administration structure. If Tanzania is to implement the reform on a larger scale, the country has to put greater emphasis on national initiatives to couple administrative layers. More money alone will not solve the problem.

Because of their novelty, our knowledge about current new-wave land reforms in sub-Saharan Africa has hitherto been limited. In the early 2000s land reforms were underway in more than 20 countries. Decentralisation of responsibility for land management has been an important intention in most reforms. How that spelled out in practice, however, remained unclear. Through implementation analyses conducted in rural areas in mainland Tanzania, the article analyses how a new-wave land reform is being implemented at the local level.

Read the article: Decoupled Implementation of New-Wave Land Reforms: Decentralisation and Local Governance of Land in Tanzania. In
Journal of Development Studies, Volume 48, Issue 2, 2012.



Land Law Reforms as Cover-Ups for Land Grabbing? (2) Reflexions on Tanzania

Were the new wave land reforms introduced only to enable the elites in sub-Saharan African countries to legalise the grabbing of land? Based on my impressions from Uganda, I discussed the question in a previous blog post. I concluded that it could be the case. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why so little effort is put into making the new land administration services, prescribed by the law, available to the majority of the population.

In Tanzania, which I know better because this is where I did most of my field research, the situation is, in some ways, less clear. The issue of land grabbing is not really part of my PhD project (which is more about land administration). However, since a titling project had been carried out in one of the districts I have studied, I could not avoid digging into it. I have focused on the choice of pilot implementation districts. Here comes my reflexions.

Four larger pilot projects have been carried out in Tanzania. I have described some of the initial experiences in the Working Paper Tanzania’s Land Law Reform: The Implementation Challenge. I do not all of them in detail and I do not know a lot about all of the districts in which they were implemented. However, there seems to be a pattern in the choice of pilot districts. There seems to have been pre-existing commercial interests in the land in the chosen districts.

The first major project was carried out in Mbozi District by the Ministry of Lands. The official explanation that I have come across for the choice of Mbozi as a pilot project district is the district’s ‘commercial farming potential’. In Mbozi District, according to the report The State of the Then NAFCO, NARCO and Absentee Landlords’ Farms/Ranches in Tanzania by Chambi Chachage, there is a large, formerly state-owned, maize farm in the waiting to be privatised. There are also a number of coffee farms owned by the Mbozi District Council. Furthermore, according to Andrew Kiondo, in the book Agrarian Economy, State and Society in Contemporary Tanzania from 1999, there were reports of illegal land sales in that area in the 1980s (p. 48).Mzeri Village. The ranch is in the hills behind the village.

The second pilot was MKURABITA’s project in Handeni District It is a project I have researched quite a bit. The official explanation for the choice of Handeni District, according to Kosyando’s report Mkurabita and the Implementation of the Village land Law was that the district, due to a previous land use planning and forestry project funded by a German aid agency, had the equipment and knowhow to implement a pilot project.

I thought of a less noble explanation when I was there. The huge Mzeri cattle ranch (41,246 hectares) was being privatised - or subleased according to Chachage’s report - in the period. The then Prime Minister Lowassa (who was later fired because of corruption) got a big chunk of land there. So did the local MP. Accidentally, one of the pilot villages is situated right next to the ranch (see the map: the green area indicates the ranch, the blue area indicates the village) and people were evicted during the survey, when they were found to be living on land that had been allocated to the farm in the 1970s. When I asked, nobody in Handeni would confirm that the pilot had to do with the privatisation of the farm. Still, I found the correlation between pilot project implementation and privatisation remarkable.

The third pilot was carried out in Bagamoyo District. With its proximity to Dar es Salaam it is a much more urban setting and there is a pressure on the land because of the expansion of the city, but also because ‘it is an easy target for land based investments, such as biofuels’ (Kosyando’s Bagamoyo report p. 5). Apparently, there is no relationship between the pilot project and land privatisation. But again, there is a remarkable correlation in time between the MKURABITA project, carried out from September 2007 to February 2008 and a large Biofuels project in the district starting from January 2008. The biofuel project, thoroughly described in Kjell Havnevik’s chapter in the book Biofuels, Land Grabbing and Food Security in Africa and Chachage’s report Acquisition and Accumulation in Tanzania, had a Swedish investor and was to be carried out on 22,000 hectares of a large, idle, cattle ranch belonging to the Government of Zanzibar.  Havnevik describes how there was a ‘great confusion’ over what the project area entailed and that pastoralists and neighboring villagers used the land. Chachage also describes a number of smaller state farms in Bagamoyo which were to be privatized in the period from 2005 onwards.

The fourth – and by far the biggest – pilot project has been carried out in Babati and Bariadi Districts by the Ministry of Lands. I do not know much about these two districts. But again, there is a correlation between project and the privation of a farm, although it is not as clear as in Bagamoyo. The pilot was carried out from 2008 to 2010, whereas the Setchet Farm was privatized in 2005. I have also noticed the recent newspaper reports on tensions over the land. According to the Citizen’s article Envoy’s Fear on Babati Clashes 30 January, much of the land had allocated to settlers during colonial times, but was left idle, sold or taken over by the state after independence. Is this the land now being resurveyed as part of the pilot project and is that giving rise to the clashes in the area? I do not know. But the commercial interests in the land seem be the same in Babati as in the other pilot districts.

My conclusion on this? My conclusion, so far, is that the 1999 land law reform may result in Tanzania’s elite legalizing the land they have grabbed, but it is not the only purpose of it. There are other elements of the reform, for instance the land court system, which has greatly helped a lot of people in the country. The land use planning requirements also have some potential. And most of the pilot project outputs actually benefitted non-elites. The people I talked to who had received a customary title deed – a CCRO – were happy about having it.

Still, when it comes to the choice of pilot implementation districts, there is a remarkable correlation between the choice of pilot project sites and commercial interests in land, in particular linked to the privatisation of former state farms and ranches. A similar focus on the sale of former state farms to investors, by the way, can be found in the Tanzanian government’s prestigious SAGCOT agricultural growth corridor. Is it land grabbing? I am not sure. Some would argue that the transactions are illegitimate and that the land, when not used by the state, should be returned to the communities it was taken from. From their point of view it is land grabbing. From a strictly legal point of view, however, I guess there is nothing wrong with the re-surveying old boundaries and the selling of the land. What do you think?

Everybody is excluded



I heard it last year in June during a course on property and rural exclusion at Roskilde University, Denmark. It was Derek Hall, associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, who said it: Everybody is excluded. It has become my favourite quote. Now, together with Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li, Derek Hall has published the book, Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia. It is an excellent book!

The main message is that all land uses require some kind of exclusion. And – as indicated by the quote – that means that somebody is excluded. Even the most powerful and scrupulous rulers are to some extent excluded. They have to obey certain rules. Nobody can grab land completely at will. For instance, Kenya’s postcolonial presidents had to keep their klemptomania in check too, according to another new book, Kenya: Between Hope and Despair 1963-2011. Despite being corrupt to the bone, they usually did not touch the property of their own constituencies - in Kenya the tribes are the constituencies - because it would undermine their power bases.

Similarly even the weaker actors in debates about land distribution aim at excluding others. I have witnessed such processes in the northern part of Tanzania, where Masais try to protect their traditional rights to land, typically through the making of land use plans. When they succeed they may protect the land from being taken by the Tanzanian elite. But they also exclude the much poorer peasants who come from other parts of Tanzania to the Masai Districts for the ‘unused’ land. This is what Hall, Hirsch and Li call exclusion’s double edge:

...exclusion creates both security and insecurity. From the moment land becomes scarce, the exclusive access to land that is productive for some comes into tension with the fact that others cannot access it (p. 8).

From an academic point of view, I find the book's approach interesting. It allows you to analyse the mechanisms at play during land struggles without too many prior assumptions about victims and perpetrators. Everybody is excluded. You just have to find out how.

Land Law Reforms as Cover-Ups for Land Grabbing? Impressions from Uganda

Surveying on a shoestring.

Ever since I started writing my PhD on land in Tanzania, I have encountered a particular, cynical interpretation of land affairs in the Sub-Saharan African countries. The new wave of land reforms passed in the last couple of decades (read about some of the reforms here), so the story goes, is a scam. According to some scholars, reform efforts are merely a way for the elites to legalise the land they have grabbed. The article Tanzania: Spreading Power or Spreading Poverty, for instance, refers to the reform as the formalisation of villagers’ dispossession (page 230).

I have always rejected the story as a conspiracy. Primarily because I did not, in Tanzania, find unambiguous evidence that supported it. Sometimes, however, I begin to doubt. It happened to me, again, last week while carrying out research in Uganda.

Uganda got its land reform with the 1998 Land Act. Like most other reforms of the late 1990s and later, it recognises existing rights to land and makes registration of customary rights to land possible. The latter is a new land law feature. Until recently, most countries had two parallel systems for the administration of land. On the one hand, they had a bureaucratic system where the white minorities had lived, typically in the cities and in settler areas. It was modelled on western land administration systems with title deeds and land registers. In other areas, they had ‘customary’ systems, which were a very diverse set of practices to handle land in ‘native’ areas. Typically, rights to land in these areas were not written down; they were witnessed by local leaders and demarcated with natural marks like stones, trees and the like. Often, state authorities did not respect the customary rights. During colonial times, land was regularly expropriated for settler agriculture. After independence, land was often expropriated for ‘development’ purposes, usually without compensation.

It was, therefore, not merely empty words when the new land reforms recognised existing rights to land. It was a signal that people had the right to the land they were living on. In Uganda, the recognition of customary rights in the 1998 Land Act meant that people could now apply for a Certificate of Customary Ownership. Unlike traditional title deeds customary certificates can largely be produced by local level authorities. Unlike the traditional title deeds, which require surveying which is prohibitively expensive for most people, a customary certificate requires a hand-drawn map of the boundaries and the acceptance and signatures of the neighbours. That is, in theory, how it was supposed to be. In practice, however, the situation is very different.

After having visited several districts, it is now clear to me that the certificates of customary ownership do not exist. They were never designed in the ministry of Lands. Subsequently, the Ministry has confirmed this. That is the reason why I start wondering whether the land reform was a scam. How else would you explain that the thing that could be of most use to the majority of poor people in the country – the customary certificates - is still not available 14 years after the passing of the Land Act? And that the government, in the meanwhile, keeps supporting expensive surveying and titling projects in geographically limited areas?

NGO-Land

The Caritas cassava.

It was when I learned that one of the more popular cassava species here in Northern Uganda is called ‘Caritas’ (the name of an international, Catholic relief organisation) that I started thinking that NGOs may have come to play too big a role in development and development assistance. The Caritas cassava was one of the things that the people in the area brought to the villages from the refugee camps, when the civil war ended in 2005-6. It is a high-yielding species that is the good thing about it.

But the thought that something was not quite right was not totally new to me. I had felt it coming for some days. The number of NGOs here is simply overwhelming. On an ordinary drive on one of the main roads in Amuru District, the number of signposts of NGOs and NGO-sponsored projects along the roadside almost equals the number of people walking. Those who have travelled in Africa will know that it means that there is a lot.

Just another junction.

It is a very expensive way of distributing the benefits of development assistance. The number of expensive 4WDs and the number of offices are not for free. The risk of overlaps is obvious. Thursday, I interviewed a local leader about land administration in Amuru District. I asked him if he had received any information about the Ugandan Land Act. In response, he started mentioning the number of NGOs he had been trained by. He gave up after number five, but he was sure there were more. And I am sure he could not really tell whether there was a difference between what the NGOs had taught him.

I have also interviewed people who claimed that ‘I was sensitised about my rights’. It is NGO-speak and another sign that you have entered NGO-land.

Another local government chairman complained about it. People in the area, he said, always talk about and praise the NGOs, but they forget about the things the Ugandan government has done for them. And in a way he is right. The government, after all, pays the teachers’ salaries and provide for rudimentary health services. On the other hand, it was the NGOs that made it possible for the people to return when they were told to leave the refugee camps. The NGOs delivered hoes and inputs for the fields and training in how to handle the land boundary disputes that would invariably arise when people returned to their land after decades in refugee camps. The government did not really think of these practical things.

Maybe the NGOs have a role to play in countries where governments fail to deliver proper services or are discredited by corruption and abuse of power. But there must be a cheaper and more coordinated way of helping people than the multitude of NGOs present in Northern Uganda.

NB: You can read more about the dangers of setting up new structures for service delivery that run parallel to existing local governments in Siri Lange’s excellent article, The Depoliticisation of Development and the Democratisation of Politics in Tanzania: Parallel Structures as Obstacles to Delivering Services to the Poor.

 

The Peasantry, Politicians and Farming Experts

Currently, while in Uganda, I follow this country’s debates about land and agriculture. This week, there is an excellent opinion piece in the East African, The Peasantry remain poor, while farming experts turn drug dealers.

The author, Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, wonders why it has proved so difficult for Ugandan politicians to solve basic problems like, for instance, providing access to veterinarians and proper extension services, which would improve productivity and well-being tremendously for the majority of people in the rural areas.

I may not share one of Frederick Golooba-Mutebi’s conclusions – that greedy experts who seek well-paid employment elsewhere are to blame than in defunct local governments. We do, after all, live in a capitalist world, like it or not, in which people are free to seek their chances and enhance their incomes. But I do share his bemusement that politicians, who are unwilling or unable to solve these basic problems, engage in lofty schemes promoting fast track modernisation of agriculture: 

...one hears politicians and policy makers who cannot solve already existing small problems talk of how poverty must be fought through grand and complex strategies such as agricultural mechanisation and the elimination of peasant agriculture.

I suspect that this observation goes not only for Uganda, but for quite a few sub-Saharan African countries.Tanzania's version of state-led mechanisation: The power tiller.

Encouraging Land Reform News from Rwanda

Sub-Saharan African countries have introduced a ‘new wave’ of land reforms in the last couple of decades (read about the reforms in this review). Unlike previous, more state-centric reforms, these new reforms decentralise responsibility for the administration of land to the local level and streamline disparate land law regimes. For instance, customary tenure and fully individualised freehold tenure may get converged into a single, more formal tenure system. Typically, reforms also aim at protecting the land rights of women and vulnerable groups.

So far, evidence has been scarce and land reform debates have largely been based on findings from past reforms. Slowly, however, results start appearing. And they are more positive than what many scholars expected. Recently, I received a Working Paper, Environmental and Gender Impacts of Land Tenure Regularisation in Africa, which presents evidence from pilot implementation projects in Rwanda, which is to carry out a nation-wide land tenure regularisation program. Its outcomes were positive, though I do not think they herald a revolution.

The paper concludes that Legally married women were significantly more likely to have their informal ownership rights documented and secured after registration. But women who were not legally married saw diminished property rights, in accordance with the law (p. 14). It is important that the pilot project has improved most women’s access to land. Titling programmes effect on gender equality was an important criticism in the past. Old-fashioned land reforms typically registered land in the name of the household head – the husband – and reduced women’s control over land (read, for instance, this working paper p. 19).

A joint title or seperate property?

The Rwandan findings are largely in line with my findings from implementation projects in Tanzania. But based on my research I would also emphasise that there are significant differences within the groups of married and unmarried women. Single women, I would say, may even be in better off than married women if they get registered as household heads. Women who get single due to divorce, on the other hand, may be worse off. Reform, in other words, polarises women’s positions.

Bottom-line is that new wave land reforms seem to improve most women’s access to land. It does not happen automatically, however. The authors of the working paper warn that ‘careful design based on local conditions, and continued monitoring during implementation’ are required. It is also my impression that the approach of implementers – whether they emphasise women’s rights to land during training sessions and implementation – is important.

Despite these significant findings, the working paper has a serious methodological weakness. It seems to me that the conclusion is based on changes in perceptions only. In other words, the researchers have been looking at whether more women are ‘entitled’ to equal ownership rights (p. 13). It does not tell us whether their actual ability to defend their rights if they have to, for instance in case of divorce. If you have more information about the Rwandan land reform and whether it has actually improved women’s tenure security it is most welcome.

Property Rights and the Rule of Law

In the last couple of weeks the international media have brought a much hyped story of a rebelling village in China. The villagers, according to the article Tense stand-of in China protest village on BBC World, are rebelling against the abuse of power and the grabbing of large chunks of land by local government officials. As a consequence, they have thrown out the corrupt officials.

It is always a good news story when people rebel against the system in authoritarian societies like the Chinese. It is, after all, a sign that states, though extremely powerful, can not, in the long run, control everything. I find the story interesting out of a different reason, though. I find it interesting because of the reason why these villagers took to the streets: to protest against land grabbing and insecure property rights.

In his most recent book, The Origin of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama describes the crucial role property rights seem to have played in the establishment of the rule of law in the northern part of Europe in the middle ages. In England, for instance, the Common Law and a decentralised court system were developed partly to protect the property rights of non-elites against the local lords. Later on, the law could even be used against kings who violated it, as happened with the revolutions in the 17th century: The success of the Glorious Revolution was therefore more a consequence of the existence of strong, credible property rights than a cause of them. Englishmen with property felt they had something important to defend (p. 419).

China, according to Fukuyama, never saw the same development. The country experienced periods with rule of law, but the principle was never properly enshrined and rulers could manipulate rights at will: Property rights existed, but they were not configured to support development of a modern market economy (...). Instead of creating incentives for private individuals to work their land more productively, the (Qin, ed.) state set output quotas (as the communist would do two millennia later) and punished peasants for failing to meet them. While the initial Qin land reform broke up entailed estates and created a market in land, no class of smallholders emerged, the land instead being absorbed by a new class of wealthy families. And there was ultimately no rule of law to limit the sovereign’s ability to confiscate property further (p. 127).

The rebellion of the Chinese villagers, thus, can also be analysed from this perspective. Sometimes, people feel that they have something important to defend, something worth fighting for. And sometimes the fight in itself has greater consequences than what the antagonists imagine. One day, the Chinese, too, may experience rule of law.

Happy New Year!

Photo from fukuyama.stanford.edu/photos

How to stop land grabbing



Grab a piece

The heated debate about large-scale land acquisitions – also called the land grabbing debate – continues. Increasingly, it is also being informed by knowledge based on genuine empirical research. This week two major reports came out, Land Rights and the Rush for Land published by the International Land Coalition and Corruption in the Land Sector published by FAO and Transparency International. Both reports provide scary reading.

The report from the Land Coalition, written by renowned scholars, claims to be the most comprehensive study of large-scale land acquisition in developing countries to date. It describes a land market out of control with illegitimate investments on an unprecedented scale, and concludes that ‘there is little in the findings to suggest that the term “land grabbing” is not widely deserved.’ The poor are paying the price when they loose their access to land.

The report from FAO and Transparency International is no less alarming. But it is more oriented towards providing advice for interventions. It is possible, as I read the report, to do something to stop land grabbing. That has to do with the reasons why land grabbing has become possible in most countries in the first place. A not very surprising insight in the report is that ‘recent findings by TI (Transparency International, ed.) show that there is a very strong correlation between levels of corruption in the land sector and overall public sector corruption in a country.’

The obvious answer to the question, how to stop land grabbing, then, is to fight corruption. But that is easier said than done. A colleague of mine, Ole Therkildsen, keeps telling me that good governance and democratization are results of economic growth – not the other way around (read about it here). But I am afraid that the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa, if they wait for the benefits of economic growth to reach them, will loose all their land in the meanwhile.

Another way to prevent land grabbing would be to ban land sales to foreign investors altogether, as is suggested by some NGOs. Personally, I am skeptical towards this option, not least because the ban primarily would apply to poor developing countries and, thus, probably be seen as some kind of neo-colonial intervention. Besides, if land deals are done properly, investments may benefit the development of more profitable agricultural sectors, also for the poor. A more viable way to prevent land grabbing is by establishing ceilings on land ownership, as I have suggested in another blog post.

Finally, there is the tiring work of reforming land governance, that is, the ‘rules, processes and structures through which decisions are made about the use of and control over land, the manner in which the decisions are implemented and enforced, and the way that competing interests in land are managed’ (quote from the FAO report). Required measures include recognition of customary rights to land, the strengthening of democratically elected local level land authorities, more accessible land court institutions, etc.

Probably, a combination of all these different measures are required. There is no easy way to stop the land grab.

Drivers of Land Grabbing and Large-Scale Land Investments

How about a shady contract?

I hate to admit it when I am wrong. But I have to. Some months ago, I wrote a blog post about land investments. Back then, I assumed that serious investors would prefer investments in well-governed countries with strong institutions, also at the local level, that could enforce property rights. I was wrong.

In a recently published Working Paper, What Drives the Global ‘Land Rush, Rabah Arezki, Klaus Deininger and Harris Selod conclude the opposite. And they base their conclusion on empirical research, not on assumptions. Had I been writing about foreign investments in general, I would have been right. In such cases the business climate matters. But when it comes to land, investors seem to prefer weak governance:

...in contrast to what is found for foreign investment more generally, rule of law and good governance have no effect on the number of land-related investment. Moreover, and counter-intuitively, we find that countries where governance of the land sector and tenure security are weak have been most attractive for investors (p. 3).

That does not mean that Sub-Saharan African countries should stop improving local governance of land. On the contrary. The authors demonstrate that if positive outcomes are to be produced, investors should fulfil specific requirements formulated by the state. In Peru, for instance, transparent auctions of large tracts of land, subsequently, brought large investments in horticulture and created many jobs.

Giving away land too cheaply or for free, on the other hand, as happens many places in Sub-Saharan Africa, is unlikely to bring any benefits to the local communities or to society at large. That was, by the way, also the conclusion of another report, What is in the Contract, published by Lorenzo Cotula earlier this year.

The problem, of course, is that countries with weak governance structures are unlikely to make such requirements and enforce them. And that the investors do not seem to care.

NB:
I am not sure that Tanzania should be categorised as a country with weak governance institutions. On the one hand, the Tanzania Investment Centre has complained that land laws are too strict, making it difficult to attract investors. On the other hand, when you read reports like Accumulation by Land Dispossession and Labour Devaluation in Tanzania from HAKIARDHI and Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa – Tanzania Country Report from the Oakland Institute, you get the impression that the country is an all-you-can-eat buffet for investors.

Agriculture, Inequality and Economic Growth

The market place coming to a town near you.

I am not an economist. Still, I find the discussions about economic growth in Africa interesting, not least because my field of study, land, is rife with theories about how land can and can not contribute to economic growth.

A very dominant theory among decision makers in Tanzania is the one about large-scale farming, which they see as a shortcut to economic growth. I am not able to tell if they are right or not. But I am quite sure that they should start focusing on Tanzania’s small-scale farmers, if they also aim at distributing the benefits of growth equally.

I write this, because I have just read a book published by the World Bank, Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent. It analyses the policies behind a number of development successes in Africa. Tanzania is such a success case because of macroeconomic stability. Tanzania’s economy has grown 6% on average since 1996. That is a number that would make most politicians in the rich world jealous. But Tanzania’s growth is not reducing poverty significantly.

The poverty rate in Tanzania was 38.6% in 1991, 35.6% in 2001 and 33.4% in 2007 according to this Twaweza publication. That is a very poor performance. It is hard to understand why the development has been that slow. But then, in the World Bank book one can read that Tanzania’s growth is driven mainly by services and industry. Agriculture did not contribute to growth. That is a problem, according to the authors, since most people in the country depend on agriculture: The limited contribution of agriculture - in a country whereabout three-quarters of the population resides in rural areas, where poverty is concentrated - is a concern (pp. 26-27). In other words, unless the Tanzanian politicians start focusing on improving the conditions of small-scale farmers, they are unlikely to reduce poverty levels significantly.

The book describes a couple of success cases where agriculture has contributed to economic growth. Malawi is one and Kenya the other. Their stories are quite different.

In 2005 the Malawian government, in response to severe food security difficulties, launched an input subsidy program. It provided vouchers for maize fertilizers to more than half of Malawi’s farm households and also distributed improved maize seeds and tobacco fertilizers. Subsequently, maize production is estimated to have increased by 26–60 percent, while food availability has improved and wages in the agricultural sector have increased.

The Kenyan story goes like this: around 1990, the Kenyan government liberalised the fertiliser market and donations by donors were phased out. The use of fertiliser, subsequently, doubled between 1992 and 2007. Much of the increased use was among smallholder farmers. Largely as a result of the increase in fertilizer usage, maize yields in Kenya increased 18 percent over 1997–2007.

Obviously, it must have been cheaper for the Kenyan government than for the Malawian to achieve the increase in production. That is part of the reason why the book’s authors like the Kenyan story better. Another reason is the more market-based Kenyan intervention (it is, after all, a World Bank publication).
What I find interesting about the Kenyan story is that fertiliser became much more accessible for most farmers after liberalisation. In some regions the average distance from the farm to the fertiliser seller was reduced from 15 kilometres in 1997 to around 4 kilometres in 2007. To me, the examples point to the importance of improving ordinary, small-scale farmers’ access: access to improved seeds, access to fertiliser, access to markets, etc.

It is possible, in other words, to improve agricultural growth without a narrow focus on large-scale agriculture. The measures described here are small, practical improvements, not the grand schemes, the distribution of tractors, and the focus on large-scale farming that Tanzanian decision makers tend to prefer (read a previous blog post about it here).

Small vs. Large-Scale Farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. A Verdict

Sufficiently efficient?

An implicit, but usually unstated, assumption of the current critique of new wave of land grabbing in Sub-Saharan is that small scale farming is socially more just and economically more efficient than large-scale farming. Subsequently even legal large scale land transactions are denounced as illegitimate land grabbing.

Large-scale farming, on the other hand, is preferred by many colonial and post-colonial governments alike, eager to attract investments. They believe that large-scale farming, often under the banner of ‘scientific agriculture’, is the only real shortcut to improving agriculture in their countries (see for instance  James Scott’s Seeing like State about the failures of the Ujamaa reforms and large-scale farming in Tanzania).

I have just read the Working Paper Experiences of Plantation and Large-Scale Farming in 20th Century Africa, which seeks to pass a verdict in the heated debate. Through a careful review of existing literature on large-scale farming and plantation farming from the first economic theories in the late 18th century up to scientific studies of the present the author, Peter Gibbon, concludes that both positions may be right. Previously, in the last half of the 20th century, scholars regarded small scale farmers as superior. That may be true any more, he writes, because of a combination of policy interventions and market developments:

The albeit unevenly rising productivity of LSF food and tobacco production in the settler economies from ca. 1960…relates to public interventions in the areas of credit, input supply and especially research and extension. These investments were racially skewed and costly – which in turn limited their lifespan. The high productivity characterizing LSF (Large-scale farming, ed.) production of higher value crops from the 1980s onward, in contrast, seems to have related to the advent of a new generation of investors and the establishment of new, relatively short global value chains linked to dynamic changes in demand in retail markets.

The lesson, in other words, is that adept policy makers can increase the productivity of large-scale farming. Policy makers can also influence the creation of jobs and the quality of jobs:
In short, productivity, employment generation and employment quality can all be subjected
to modification by policy – policies to support capital intensification, policies to promote farming of more labour intensive crops and policies of labour protection.

Peter Gibbon thus identifies ways to increase the benefits from large-scale farming. But he has not analysed whether similar interventions could enhance the productivity and wellbeing of small-scale farmers, who make up the majority of people in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is a shame. More attention should be devoted to supporting the activities of small-scale farmers. Not because they are more efficient, but because it will contribute to a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Land Markets

Above and below some impressions from Uganda where I am currently involved in a research project about land, land markets and economic growth. Land is increasingly becoming an investment object in many Sub-Saharan African countries. That is obviously also the case in Uganda. The photos show some of the negative consequences when land markets become too lively. I have not seen similar signs in Tanzania.

Brief on Tanzania’s Land Reform out now

I have published the Policy Brief The Forgotten Villages. Land Reform in Tanzania. Click here to download it free of charge.

Tanzania's 1999 land reform has decentralised land administration to the rural local village governments, but implementation so far has been slow and uneven. The local authorities rarely get the support they need to make it work. As a consequence, the benefits promised by the reform - economic growth and improved tenure security - do not happen.

There has already been an abundance of donor driven projects to implement the reform, but they have been short-sighted and have tended to forget the local authorities that carry out the actual implementation. Much could be achieved if higher level authorities and NGOs systematically strengthened the village authorities and enabled them to deliver their services. This would be a long-term process and more money alone would not solve the problem. But as long as this level of administration is forgotten, the land reform will not work in practice.

Corruption or Trust. Land Administrations in East Africa

How about a little survey?

I am currently in Uganda, working on a report about land. I have met quite a few people working within the land sector here - public officials, scholars and donors alike - who complain about people’s ignorance and lack of trust in the government and in public authorities. The lack of trust, they say, is the reason why people at the local level often shun land surveyors and fight titling, which they see as a government scheme to take land. These people, so the argument goes, fight ‘development’. Interestingly, I have encountered the same complaints from land officials in Tanzania.

Now, today, I read an article in the Ugandan Daily Monitor, that the Ugandan Ministry of Lands is perceived as one of the most corrupt institutions in East Africa. The funny thing is that the same goes for the land institutions in Tanzania. Every year, when Transparency International publishes its corruption index for Tanzania, the land administration institutions top the list as some of the most corrupt.

That makes me wonder whether ‘lack of trust’ is the right way to phrase the problem. I tend to see the people’s behaviour, when they shun land officials and land projects, as perfectly rational. The real problem, then, is corruption. Corruption, after all, undermines trust.

Why quoting dictators and genociders is a bad idea

I do not consider myself a right-winger. Still, I am appalled when I see Lenin’s work on agriculture and land quoted as just another scientific theory, as the authors of the introduction to the new special issue of Journal of Peasant Studies, Nancy Lee Peluso and Christian Lund, do. I have encountered similar references to Lenin in for instance Sara Berry’s No Condition is Permanent (page 139) and in Susie Jacobs’ Gender and Agrarian Reforms. Jacobs even highlight the Soviet-type collectivisation in the 1930s for ‘equalising women’s position within the economic sphere’ (page 57). I find the practice inappropriate.

Lenin died in 1924 and he can, therefore, not be blamed directly for the collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union in 1929-30, which caused starvation and millions of deaths. But his justification of the excessive use of force, his contempt for democracy, his identification of groups among the peasants who were threats to the desired socialist development and the nationalisations and the forced modernisation under his rule paved the way.

Hitler probably also had interesting thoughts about land in Eastern Europe, which he used to legitimise the German quest for Lebensraum there, as did genociders in Rwanda in the 1994 and the people behind the ethnic violence in Kenya in 2007-8. But the consequences of their ideas, the killings, disqualify their ‘theories’ about land. In my eyes, Lenin is no different. I do not think it is a good idea to quote dictators and genociders as if they were theoreticians. Really.

Poster from Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.

Good news from the Tanzanian Government?

It is not often that I praise the Tanzanian government. But good news appeared from there recently. Maybe. At a conference for land stakeholders the Minister of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development, Mrs. Tibaijuka, decried the bitter conflicts between villagers and investors. Her comments were, I believe, aimed at the land grabbing debate. In order to end these conflicts, she said, according to an article in the Citizen, the Ministry of Lands had made rules to ensure that no land is allocated and no deals are made unless local representatives are made part of the process and play a part in signing the documents. If that means that the village authorities are guaranteed a role and final say in land deals, this is good news!

In a previous blog post I have written about the lack of sustainability which characterises deals made without proper involvement of the village authorities. I have also written about the amendments of the Village Land Act, currently underway, which are rumoured to aim at facilitating land deals by bypassing the villages authorities. If Mrs. Tibaijuka’s announcement means that the village authorities’ role in land deals will be strengthened, it is a new signal and a very positive one. But maybe that was not what Mrs. Tibaijuka meant. According to the article in the Citizen she said that local representatives should be made aware and play a part in the deals and then she continued: Councillors and MPs should attend all the meetings in which plans to offer land to an investor are discussed. They should comply with the plans before any deal is signed. But are district councillors and MPs ‘local representatives’ when it comes to land deals? I am not so sure.

What made the Village Land Act so significant, when it was passed in 1999, was the decentralisation of power over land to the village level authorities, that is, to the people living on the land. By then, Tanzania had witnessed several incidents of land grabbing where corrupt district leaders and district land officers had sold village land without consulting the communities. Some of these shady deals were documented in the reports by the Land Commission, headed by Professor Shivji. If the new system referred to by Mrs. Tibaijuka means that the village authorities will, now again, be bypassed when land deals are made, it is not a step forward. It is the opposite.

Decentralisation and State Involvement

In a newly published FAO Working Paper, Communal Tenure and the Governance of Common Property Resources in Asia, Kirsten Ewers Andersen concludes that the establishment of new, formal tenure institutions at the local level requires a great deal of social engineering. That sounds frightening.

The wording, though not her later conclusion, is in line with much literature within the study of land reform with its strong tradition of state critique. I believe they are wrong, a point I shall elaborate on at the end of this blog post.

Thomas Sikor and Daniel Müller’s article, The Limits of State-Led Land Reform, from 2009 is a prime example of the tradition critical towards the state. It argues that empirical and conceptual insights suggest the benefits of a shift in emphasis from state to community in land reform. They do not, however, take into account that most of the last two decades’ land reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa already aim at strengthening the local level in the management of land. In Tanzania, for instance, responsibility over the administration of land in rural areas has been devolved to the village authorities.

That does not mean that the decentralized administration works in practice. John W. Bruce and Anna Knox’s article, Structures and Stratagems: Making Decentralization of Authority over Land in Africa Cost-Effective, points out that it is expensive to make decentralisation work. They, too, suggest building on existing traditional authorities because traditional authorities are remarkably cost effective in delivering local land administration….

To strengthen the role of traditional authorities, however, should not mean withdrawal of the state though that is often what is implied in the critique of the state. As Kirsten Ewers Andersen points out communities often need support and recognition by the state in order to manage effectively… (page 2). Her observation is in line with one of the main findings from my research, namely that decentralisation of responsibility for the administration of land requires active involvement by outside actors.

It is counter-intuitive, but to make decentralisation work is not merely a matter of state withdrawal. NGOs can do their bit, but their reach is limited to geographically limited interventions. If decentralisation of natural resource management is to work in an entire country, engagement of state authorities is key. Both community and state institutions will have to learn the new rules of the game. Social engineering or not.

...and the Tanzanian Government’s Position on Land is...

It came the day after, actually, the government’s position on the land distribution issue I had asked for in my previous blog post. All the major English-language newspapers had it on their frontpages: PM rushes to the rescue of Sh48bn lands budget (the Citizen); PM allayes fears over land (the Guardian); PM defends large scale farmers (Daily News).

The newspapers reported that the Prime Minister had stepped into the parliamentary debate to support the minister of Lands, Anne Tibaijuka. He made it clear that large-scale farming is imperative for this country and that foreign investors play a key role in achieving this. This position is of no surprise, though, it could be deducted from previous government practices, but it has rarely been spelled out in the public.

With his comments the Prime Minister turned the debate into whether you are for or against foreign investors and economic development. That, however, is a bit beside the point. As I see it, the real question is which kind of foreign investments you are interested in attracting? As the recent report Land Deals in Africa: What’s in the Contracts? points out, if a land deal is to improve the living conditions at the local level, it should explicitly state so. It should also be very specific about what should be achieved in terms of job creation, training and infrastructure. Past experiences have shown that not all land deals bring development.

Personally, I believe that some kinds for large-scale investments may be beneficial, for instance contract farming, where the small-scale farmers keep the control over their land and receive inputs and training from investors. The large-scale land deals, on the other hand, which render more small-scale farmers landless than they create formal jobs, are unlikely to have a positive effect on local livelihoods.

This brings me back to the question of the distribution of land in this country. According the Guardian the prime minister proudly stated during the debate that all land in Tanzania will remain state property and that the government would not budge on this issue. However, that is of little comfort for the small-scale farmers and the pastoralists whose land has been expropriated by the government and sold off to investors. Do their rights to land not deserve similar guarantees from the government?

‘MPs accuse ex-presidents over land grabbing’

The debate about land in Tanzania has finally broken into the open. The above headline is a copy-pasted from today’s cover story in the Citizen. According to the article, members of the Tanzanian parliament accuse ex-presidents and former prime ministers for grabbing large chunks of land. For once, land is not covered as a small story about regularities in a remote district, hidden inside the paper. This story is front page and hits core land affairs issues. Both members of the opposition and the ruling party take part.

The rumours about leading politicians owning large tracts of land are not new. I have written about them in previous blog posts. But it is new that the debate addresses the issue directly. And it is new that it is debated openly in the parliament. They debate is likely to be heated.

Personally, as an academic, I find the land grabbing term imprecise because it bunches too many disparate phenomena together. For instance investments, which have followed all legal procedures, are put on an equal footing with outright illegal theft of land. Still, I find that the MPs and the press deserve applause for starting a serious debate about the distribution of land in this country. Irrespective of one’s position on the issue, the debate should be welcomed. It is high time. I look forward to the government’s response.

No Promised Land. Tanzanian Land Use and Urban Planning Failure

Travelling through Tanzania these days is like doing a pilgrimage in Egypt at the time of the ten plagues. On doors and walls all over the country you find red marks, similar to the ones their god ordered the Israelites to make on doorposts, using lamb’s blood, to make sure that their houses would be bypassed untouched when the tenth and most cruel plague was initiated: the killing of all firstborn children in Egypt.

In present-day Tanzania, however, the marks signify demolition, not salvation. Demolition of houses and property of almost biblical proportions. The man behind the operation is the ever effective Minister for Works John Magufuli. The Minister has, correctly, observed that the lack of compliance with laws and regulations has led to anarchy along Tanzania’s thousands of kilometres of roads. According to the article Magufuli’s warning to road encroachers in the Citizen he points out that it has become very difficult to expand the roads because of the houses which have been built on road reserves.

In Dar es Salaam the congestion has become critical and the city struggles to cope with the increase in the number of cars. Magufuli wants to draw a line in the sand and demolish all the buildings which have been constructed too close to the road. In a speech in parliament he challenged those who did not agree:
‘If members of Parliament feel it is not right, let us agree that Tanzanian roads should measure only 30 centimetres’.

The problem with settlements which do not follow rules and regulations goes a long way back. Therefore, when travelling through Tanzania’s countryside, you will find even decade-old housed marked for demolition. In those villages where houses are dotted along a main road, the majority of houses are likely to disappear if the order is carried out.

One can choose to applaud Magufuli’s effort to improve public order as does the Citizen in its editorial Time to crack the whip last week. The irregularities have to stop, better today than tomorrow.

Still, I find the dictum a bit too simplistic. The irregularities are not merely caused by people’s desire to circumvent laws and regulations. They are also caused by underfinanced and malfunctioning land management authorities and inaccessible land use planning services, as pointed out by professor Kombe from the ARDHI University in Dar es Salaam in several books and articles (read for instance his paper about the last decades’ development within the sector in Informal Land Management in Tanzania and the Misconception about its Illegality). If everybody had waited for advice and services from these authorities, Dar es Salaam would still be a village today.

It is therefore not fair to put all the blame for the irregularities on ‘encroachers’. The dysfunctional public authorities are also responsible. The red marks, thus, are not only symbols of irregularities which are to be corrected. They are also symbols of the failures of Tanzania’s land authorities.

Secrecy in Lawmaking. Lessons from the drafting of Tanzania’s new constitution and the amendments of the land laws

NGOs working with land here in Tanzania are up in arms. There are rumours that amendments of the Village Land Act, which governs most land in the rural areas, are underway. As usual, it is hard to find out exactly what is on the table. Rumours are abound, but no one outside the government really knows what is coming.

The closest I have got is a summary of a speech, held by the Permanent Secretary in the Prime Ministers’ Office at a Tanzania-India Friendship Association Symposium, in which he evaluates the implementation of Kilimo Kwanza, President Kikwete’s pet project introduced two years ago to bring a Green Revolution to Tanzanian agriculture. I have been searching for the speech in its entirety but I have not, so far, been able to find it. So we shall have to do with the summary brought in the Guardians’ bimonthly Kilimo Kwanza section (I always wonder who pays for the publishing of that section, by the way. It should not be too cheap getting such praises of government initiatives printed).

So far, Kilimo Kwanza has not brought much new under the sun. It focuses on promoting mechanisation and large-scale investments in agriculture. That approach has been tested repeatedly by colonial and post-independence governments alike, but with very modest success, to put it mildly. The amendments to the Village Land Act seem to continue down the same beaten track. According to the Guardian the amendments are aiming to facilitate access to village land for agricultural investment (The Guardians’ Kilima Kwanza section, 5 July 2011, page 3).

NGOs have pointed out that unless Kilima Kwanza starts addressing the need of small-scale farmers, who make up the vast majority of farmers in Tanzania, the initiative is unlikely to bring much development (read some examples of the critique here and here). It has also been pointed out by a Swahili Street blog post that the approach, with its focus on delivery of tractors and power tillers, is top-down and does address the needs of most farmers.

But I am digressing; we should get back to the amendments of the land acts. They seem to be made in a similar top-down manner as Kilimo Kwanza. The government has come pretty far in the lawmaking process, with a draft currently being reviewed by the Attorney General. It seems get amended without prior public debate and without asking the NGO’s and experts working within the field for comments and advice. Secrecy is the preferred approach and that intrigues me a bit.

It reminds me of the process preparing for a new constitution for Tanzania, which came to a halt in April this year after fierce critique. The Constitution Review Bill, it turned out, did not provide for the involvement of Tanzanians in the drafting process. In the end, the government had to withdraw the bill. The quality turned out not to be good enough, I believe that some lessons could be learned from that story.

The spirit of Nyerere?

Nyere Park, Dodoma, Tanzania.

I just got home to Dar es Salaam after a couple of days in Dodoma, the political capital of Tanzania. There, I did the mandatory city cruise. In Mwalimu J.K. Nyerere Park I was fascinated by the contradictory symbols, depicted in the photo, which are so typical for Tanzania. To the left, a statue of Nyerere, the president of Tanzania for more than two decades after the independence, and the inventor of African socialism. In the middle, a business college, which, I assume, must have been established after Nyerere retired in 1985. And finally, to the right, there is a billboard advertising the services of one of the main telecommunication companies in Tanzania, using a photo of the very same Nyerere as an eye-catcher.

Today, more than ten years after his death in 1999, Nyerere is still a major figurehead in the country. Even those, whose land and property were nationalised and those whose huts were demolished and burned during the Ujamaa heydays of his reign, see him as the father of the nation. It would, therefore, be an exaggeration to accuse the telecommunication company of violating any intellectual property rights. Nyerere belongs to everybody. In a sense, he has been nationalised too. Still, I can not help wondering whether the use of his photo for such commercial purposes is in the spirit of Nyerere?

Decentralised Land Management: Guidelines for Public Servants

It's all theirs.

I still remember how surprised I was when I overheard a Tanzanian district land officer telling village leaders not inform villagers about decisions related to land. Since then I have come across participatory land use planning which does not involve the locals, court verdicts which are not made public and land deals which are public secrets. It is all a bit confusing for a guy like me, who naively believes that the public servants should serve the people, not the other way around.

The more so because the Tanzanian land acts from 1999 make it very clear that village land is to be managed by the village authorities which include the village councils and village assemblies. The latter are forums where all grown-up persons in a village can participate. District officials are only supposed to provide advice to the villagers.

News stories from the last couple of weeks reveal similar problems within the forest sector. The Guardian, on 30th June, brought the front page story ‘Illegal Logging Rages, Blamed on Corruption’ which reveals that forest officials are involved dubious logging activities in forest reserves in Tanga Region. Villagers are now afraid to report illegal logging because of threats. Two weeks later the Citizen brought two similar stories (read here and here) from Lindi and Kilindi Districts, where the district forest offices have issued logging permits without consulting villagers, and despite the forest conservation project which had been carried out in one of the districts.

It is not only in Tanzania that it is hard to make decentralisation reform work in practice. Senegal has some of the best forest laws in Sub-Saharan Africa, which devolves power to the communities. However, a study by Jesse Ribot has shown that officials in the old forest service find it very hard to change the way they work and hand over power over resources to the local communities.

This brings me to a somewhat overlooked aspect of the reforms aiming at decentralising management of land and natural resources which have been passed in many developing countries the last couple of decades. For good reasons there has been much focus on the community level afterwards. But there has been too little focus on the higher levels within the administrative framework. They also have to change practices if decentralisation is to work. Here are some some guidelines to the public servants who are employed at these upper echelons of the bureaucracy:

- Responsibility over the administration of land has been decentralised to the local level. Get used to it. The communities are the ones to control their land, not you.

- You are still important, but your job has changed. Now, your main work task is to facilitate activities in the communities. Give them the necessary information about the new legal framework and support them in taking hand of their new rights and responsibilities.

- Stop telling the communities what to do with their land. Ask them what they want to do with it instead.