Land Affairs

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.