Land Affairs

...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.