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?
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