Land Affairs

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?

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.

 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Land of Desperation

I recognise desperate people when I meet them. I have encountered quite a few during my research into land affairs in rural areas in Tanzania. Actually, I have come to see desperation as a very Tanzanian thing, on a par with Tingatinga paintings and Daladala taxis. Where I come from, people may get frustrated, but rarely are they desperate. But here...hui...!

I was reminded of the Tanzanian kind of desperation the other day, when I read the article District Officials Accused of Harassing Villagers in the Guardian (9 July). District officials and the district commissioner in Kilombero District, so the story goes, have given almost 10,000 hectares of land to an investor for sugar cane production. At least 10,000 people have been evicted. Now, the villagers who dare to protest are getting arrested on fabricated charges. Desperation sounds like this villager’s statement: We have got families, where should we go? The government should protect us, not alienate us.

For an outsider it is always difficult to know who is right and who is wrong in this kind of conflicts. It is, however, quite likely that there is something rotten going on in Kilombero. The land offices are generally seen as among the poorest performers when it comes to public sector service delivery in Tanzania. Corruption is rife. These are the conclusions in the report, National Governance and Corruption Survey, published by the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) earlier this year.

So what do ordinary Tanzanians do when the ones who were supposed to protect them betray them? They do not have many options. The judiciary is also corrupt, according to an article in the Citizen in the weekend. The Tanzanian Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance is not really functioning if you listen to the rumours here in Dar es Salaam. And it is hardly accessible for people in the rural areas anyway. To elect new local representatives for the district councils is also unlikely to make any difference because the heads of administration in the districts, the district commissioners and the district executive directors, are still, despite decades of decentralisation reforms, appointed by the central government.

So where do ordinary people go when the bureaucrats abuse power? They may go to the NGOs and they may try to attract to the attention of the media, as did the people in Kilombero District. But to be heard is not the same thing as getting justice. More local control over local affairs, including over the district bureaucrats, would probably help.

Property Hierarchies

My feminist friends talk about ‘white heterosexual men’ when they want to point out how certain traits in society favours some groups and disadvantages others (read examples of it here and here). I have come to realise that the perspective is also applicable to land affairs. Here, too, hierarchies are at play which structure access to land and property, though things, of course, are a bit more complex than the slogan indicates.

I realised that the ‘white heterosexual men’ perspective was applicable within land and property studies, when I read a press release from European gay activists welcoming a communiqué by the European Commission on property rights of married couples and registered partners. The communiqué, so they argue, is breaking new ground because it treats homosexual couples and heterosexual couples equally when it comes to property rights. That has been a normal practice in countries in the northern part of the European Union for well over a decade now, but in some of the member countries in the eastern part of Europe, homosexuals still face discrimination when it comes to inheritance. There, a person may not inherit the partner’s property despite having shared a life together with him or her. A communiqué at the European level puts these people in a better position.

The situation of these homosexuals, in some ways, reminds me of the situation of women in some rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. They, too, face eviction or loss of property when their husbands die. Most of the new wave of land reforms, which have been carried out in many countries the last couple of decades, prohibit gender discrimination. But the traditional practices are often too strong and the laws are not implemented.

Pastoralists are also disfavoured in many African countries. The new book Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous, by Dorothy Hodgson, describes Tanzanian Maasai’s political struggles over the last couple of decades. One of the Maasias main aims has been to get recognised as a group with a specific culture and lifestyle. Another aim has been to find ways to protect their rights to land. The long history of land expropriations that pastoralist groups in Tanzania have experienced did not stop with independence. Post-colonial authorities continued the practice. At the same time, people from other parts of Tanzania now settle where the pastoralists used to graze their cattle. Land which is not under the plough is considered vacant and, thus, a potential object for farming and investment. In 2007, according to a memo quoted in the book, President Kikwete stated that the livestock keeping, using mobility as its key strategy, has no future for pastoralists in the country (Hodgson 2011, 172).

Tanzanian decision makers may be right that the pastoralist lifestyle is under threat. The competition for land is fierce. And pastoralists are, after all, also modernising. What makes their statements slightly problematic, however, is that they put the blame on the pastoralist instead of seeking to protect their rights to land. Most other groups in Tanzania, I believe, would get treated differently if their land was being taken.

That brings me back to the reason why I find the ‘white heterosexual men’ perspective too simplistic. The people accumulating land in Tanzania are not all white. On the opposite. The investors I heard about during my research in Tanzania's rural areas were all elite Tanzanians from the major cities. And the Tanzanian decision makers, who are responsible for the policies which make the land alienations possible, are certainly not white. That was, indeed, also pointed out by two Ministers in the article Investment debate grows more fierce in the Guardian, on July 3rd, in which they made it clear that the formulation of the right policies is a Tanzanian responsibility. Finally, the ones benefitting from the current state of affairs may not even be male.

To focus on the privileges of ‘white heterosexual men’ is, in other words, misleading when it comes to land affairs. But, the perspective - that there is a hierarchy among groups, whose rights are not equally well protected – is still worth pursuing.

Property Hierarchies

My feminist friends talk about ‘white heterosexual men’ when they want to point out how certain traits in society favours some groups and disadvantages others (read examples of it here and here). I have come to realise that the perspective is also applicable to land affairs. Here, too, hierarchies are at play which structure access to land and property, though things, of course, are a bit more complex than the slogan indicates.

I realised that the ‘white heterosexual men’ perspective was applicable within land and property studies, when I read a press release from European gay activists welcoming a communiqué by the European Commission on property rights of married couples and registered partners. The communiqué, so they argue, is breaking new ground because it treats homosexual couples and heterosexual couples equally when it comes to property rights. That has been a normal practice in countries in the northern part of the European Union for well over a decade now, but in some of the member countries in the eastern part of Europe, homosexuals still face discrimination when it comes to inheritance. There, a person may not inherit the partner’s property despite having shared a life together with him or her. A communiqué at the European level puts these people in a better position.

The situation of these homosexuals, in some ways, reminds me of the situation of women in some rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. They, too, face eviction or loss of property when their husbands die. Most of the new wave of land reforms, which have been carried out in many countries the last couple of decades, prohibit gender discrimination. But the traditional practices are often too strong and the laws are not implemented.

Pastoralists are also disfavoured in many African countries. The new book Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous, by Dorothy Hodgson, describes Tanzanian Maasai’s political struggles over the last couple of decades. One of the Maasias main aims has been to get recognised as a group with a specific culture and lifestyle. Another aim has been to find ways to protect their rights to land. The long history of land expropriations that pastoralist groups in Tanzania have experienced did not stop with independence. Post-colonial authorities continued the practice. At the same time, people from other parts of Tanzania now settle where the pastoralists used to graze their cattle. Land which is not under the plough is considered vacant and, thus, a potential object for farming and investment. In 2007, according to a memo quoted in the book, President Kikwete stated that the livestock keeping, using mobility as its key strategy, has no future for pastoralists in the country (Hodgson 2011, 172).

Tanzanian decision makers may be right that the pastoralist lifestyle is under threat. The competition for land is fierce. And pastoralists are, after all, also modernising. What makes their statements slightly problematic, however, is that they put the blame on the pastoralist instead of seeking to protect their rights to land. Most other groups in Tanzania, I believe, would get treated differently if their land was being taken.

That brings me back to the reason why I find the ‘white heterosexual men’ perspective too simplistic. The people accumulating land in Tanzania are not all white. On the opposite. The investors I heard about during my research in Tanzania's rural areas were all elite Tanzanians from the major cities. And the Tanzanian decision makers, who are responsible for the policies which make the land alienations possible, are certainly not white. That was, indeed, also pointed out by two Ministers in the article Investment debate grows more fierce in the Guardian, on July 3rd, in which they made it clear that the formulation of the right policies is a Tanzanian responsibility. Finally, the ones benefitting from the current state of affairs may not even be male.

To focus on the privileges of ‘white heterosexual men’ is, in other words, misleading when it comes to land affairs. But, the perspective - that there is a hierarchy among groups, whose rights are not equally well protected – is still worth pursuing.

Conservation a Potential Threat to Local Communities

A threat to conservation? Photo by Pernille/Photografika.

A recent study, carried out by U4, an anticorruption centre based in Norway, and co-authored by Swahili Street, has shown that the risk of corruption is high in some of the African countries with REDD forest conservation projects. The study describes a number of ways projects may be derailed by corruption. It concludes that 'In some instances REDD could serve to enhance rather than decrease forest governance
challenges, for example by providing an incentive for new forms of forest-linked corruption' (p. 18).

The problem with the new forms of corruption is not only that forests may not get protected. The major problem, as I see it, is that resources may get eaten by politicians, entrepreneurs and officials before ever reaching the communities they were intended for.

REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a novel approach fostered by the international fight against climate change. It aims at rewarding governments, companies and forest owners in the South for keeping their forests instead of cutting them down. We are talking about big money. Norway, a major donor, has pledged to invest up to 3 billion USD in REDD projects until 2012.
That may affect governance of natural resources. National elites in the receiving countries now have an incentive to recentralise management in order to control the resource flows. REDD may, potentially, undermine the decentralisation processes which, over the last couple of decades, have vested more responsibility for and ownership over natural resources in the local communities in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The potential corruption problems identified by the report revitalises an ongoing debate within academia about the links between community forestry and conservation. A recent article in the magazine Environmental Policy and Governance concludes that there is ‘no systematic correlation between presence of community forestry projects and forest conservation’. The article reviews 56 case studies of local forest management experiences. Of these the majority, however, shows a positive impact on conservation. Practitioners have also hinted that there may be a problem. The Bottom Up Thinking blog http://bottomupthinking.wordpress.com/author/ discusses the link between integrated conservation and development projects ‘which often deliver neither conservation nor development’.

The community based approaches were the new panacea from the 1980s onwards, when colonial and post-independence governments’ heavy-handed conservation practices had proved ineffective. Previously, local communities had typically been expelled when national parks and forest reserves were established. The communities in the areas surrounding the reserves were therefore often against the conservation efforts from the outset. Encroachment and poaching were the logical consequences. To vest responsibility over the management of natural resources in local communities, then, was thought to increase the locals’ sense of ownership and their incentives for protecting the resource. It is now clear that such win-win situations, which benefit both local communities and preservation of forests, should not be taken for granted.

Conservation projects should be quite clear in spelling out the pros and cons for communities and for conservation alike. That would make it easier for local communities to hold higher level politicians and bureaucrats accountable. And vice versa. The above mentioned article concludes that the state may still have a role to play in ensuring conservation, even in cases where the responsibility for management has been decentralised to the local communities.

It is a dilemma. History is rife with stories about state elites ignoring local rights to natural resources on the pretext of protecting nature and the common good.

Land, Power and Party Politics

Researching a highly politicised topic – land in Tanzania - I regularly have to remind myself of a proverb I learned during my first years of studies, when I struggled to understand French post-structuralist thinkers: Though everything in society, from a certain perspective, may involve power, it does not imply that everything is about power.

Translated into the language of land affairs the proverb means that whereas theories about the abuse of power - corruption, elite or donor capture – may apply for parts of the administration of land in Tanzania, they are not likely to apply for all of it. Some of the people working with land actually spend a great deal of their time taking care of their regular work tasks. Such regular day-to-day workings can not be explained by conspiracy theories about the use and abuse of power.

But then, sometimes, I come across stories which make me doubt the wisdom of the proverb. It happened to me last week when I found an article in the Citizen about a dispute over land in Moshi, a major town and an opposition stronghold in the northern part of in Tanzania.

According to one story, councillors from Chadema, the main opposition party in Tanzania, try to ensure that all public property in Moshi stays public. That also includes two plots used by the ruling party, CCM, one plot for its headquarters and another for its youth wing.

CCM, on the other hand, has threatened to take legal actions to get the title deeds it feels it is entitled to. According to the second news story, CCM claims that it has acquired the plots legally.

From the outside it is extremely difficult to find out what is up and what is down in this story. It is definitely about power. But is it also about abuse of power? Personally, I would like to know how and when these plots were acquired. According to the excellent book, Why Planning does not Work?, by Tumsifu Jonas Nnkya, the administration of land in Moshi has previously been marred by irregularities, top-down management, and misuse of power.

Demand-driven or Donor-driven Land Reform?

Photo from a village administration. Maybe a crash course in bookkeeping would help?

Last week I attended a workshop in Dar es Salaam about land in Tanzania. I did a presentation, based on my working paper, which concludes that the implementation of the Village Land Act in rural areas in Tanzania is slow, uneven and project-driven. After the presentation some of the participants raised an interesting question about the political economy of the Tanzanian land law reform; they suggested that the slow implementation could be caused by a land reform agenda which is donor-driven and without Tanzanian ownership.

After having thought about it, I have come to the conclusion that this point of view can not be outright rejected. Still, there is strong evidence that Tanzanian decision makers have the major stakes in the reform.

According to Geir Sundet’s D.Phil dissertation (see his analysis of the Land Acts here), the policy formulation process was started as a response to an increase in the number of conflicts over land and an increased focus on investment promotion in the late 1980s. The Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development established its own policy-making body and, simultaneously, the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters carried out a nation-wide tour of consultations before publishing its final report and recommendations in 1992. Combined, the two bodies prepared the ground for the reform. The National Land Policy from 1995 and, later, the Land Acts from 1999, are based on their recommendations. Tanzanian politicians’ incessant talk of formalisation also indicates that the land reform agenda is very much a Tanzanian agenda.

The implementation projects after the passing of the reform, on the other hand, have been heavily influenced by donors. When the Strategic Plan for the Implementation of the Land Laws (SPILL) was finalised in 2005, it was estimated that it would cost over 300 billion TSH to carry out. Out of this amount only about 3 billion were foreseen to come from the ordinary government budget. Availability of donor funding have therefore, by and large, been decisive for the extent to which implementation projects have been carried out. Still, even these projects have been carried out under the auspices of the Ministry of Lands and of another government-backed agency, MKURABITA.

I do not, in other words, find much evidence supporting the claim that the land reform agenda is donor-driven. I shall suggest asking the question of ownership differently: has the implementation, so far, been top-down or bottom-up? The Land Acts decentralise responsibility for administering land in rural areas to the villages. Still, strikingly little effort has been devoted to enable the village authorities to take care of the new tasks they have been assigned with.

Are Tanzanian Farmers Stupid?

A Tanzanian farmer on his power tiller.

The advices given to small-scale farmers sometimes make we wonder what planet Tanzania’s politicians and the public officials are from. I thought of it again this morning when I came across an article in the Citizen, inspired by a District Commissioner in Mvomero District, who was complaining about farmers being backward. Allegedly they prefer the hand hoe over using a power tiller when preparing their fields. Therefore, so the story goes, the farmers are to blame for the failure of the President’s high profile initiative to increase agricultural production, Kilimo Kwanza.

Tanzanian farmers may be conservative. But to my knowledge, they are not stupid. Based on my intuition, being the son of a farmer myself (though not a Tanzanian one), I shall suggest that the district commissioner takes a closer look at the economy of the farmers in her district. Farmers where I come from, being confronted with new government schemes, usually ask, whether they pay off. I imagine that Tanzanian farmers may ask the same question. They do, after all, not farm for President Kikwete. They farm for themselves and their families.

Farmers may have good reasons for not using power tillers. I can think of several reasons; they cannot afford the fuel; it is cheaper (for those who can afford it) to hire manual labourer; their plots of land are too small; the risk is too high. Concerning the latter, I would suspect that the risk is quite high. In case a power tiller breaks down in a remote area, a farmer may have to wait long for spare parts. Maybe there is no fuel around. In case of drought he or she may loose a big investment. Etc.

In a remote village I once visited, I was told that the district agricultural extension officer had passed by recently. He had advised people to use tractors. I was amazed. The previous year, that village had been hunger struck because of draught. Their biggest problem was water. Or the lack of drought resistant crops. Or the bad road, which made it difficult for them to get to town with their produce…

If you ask small-scale farmers in Tanzania what they need the most to increase their production, they would probably make a long wish-list before they started thinking of power tillers and tractors. It could be an interesting exercise by the way. What would happen if politicians and public officials started asking farmers what they need instead of telling them what to do?

Tanzania’s Land Law Reform - Slow and uneven Progress

NGOs and the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlement Development are involved in a significant number of projects to implement Tanzania’s land law reform from 1999. Still, implementation in rural areas is slow and uneven. That is my conclusion in the working paper I published this month. You can download the working paper free of charge here.

If you have comments to the working paper, please, feel free to write to me here or on my E-mail address, which you find here.

Land and investments in agriculture

It can be a bit confusing to follow debates about land and investments in land. On the one hand you hear about land grabbing and land acquisitions for investments in large-scale farming in rural areas. On the other hand you hear investors complain about laws which are too strict and hinder investments. Can both be true?

The last couple of weeks I have had an article from the Citizen with the heading Farming Still Attracts few Investors on my desk, and I have struggled to make sense of it. It is an interview with the executive director, Emmanuel Ole Naiko, from Tanzania Investment Centre. He complains that it is hard to make land available for investments because The Village Land Act of 1999 renders it difficult to get it out of village control and onto the land market. According to him, too many meetings with villagers and too complex procedures are prescribed.

Mr Naiko’s statements to the Citizen largely correspond with my observations from the countryside; the land acts, when it comes to large-scale investments, provide a pretty good protection of the villager’s rights to land. According to the law, the local village authorities have a big say in managing village land and the villagers also get consulted (to some extent at least).

But that, of course, requires that the law is implemented on the local level; that villagers know their rights and control their leaders, that local leaders get trained in the procedures, and that legal institutions are easily accessible to enforce rights if they are violated. If these things are not in place (and in most villages they are not), local leaders and public officials can cooperate to bypass the administrative procedures prescribed by the land acts.

It is my impression that irregularities occur. But it is also my impression that they do rarely occur on a very large scale. Often land is given to local wabwana kubwas, big men like bank directors, district commissioners, and MPs, who can get away with semi-illegal transactions as long as they do not overdo it. Most of the large scale land grabbing I have heard of stem from the 1980s and 1990s, i.e. from before the passing of the village land act.

The above are reflections based on my impressions from talks with villagers, NGOs and local leaders and from newspaper articles - land grabbing and land investments are not the focus of my study and I have not investigated the phenomena systematically. I may be wrong?

Land and Politics

   A disputed area in Northern Tanzania.

When I framed my research project about land rights in Tanzania I decided not to focus on land grabs and state expropriations of land. Firstly, I wanted to focus on ordinary people and what I thought mattered to them - their access to land administration services (registration of rights, registration of sales and leases, etc.). Secondly, I was warned that though Tanzania is a democracy its leaders and bureaucrats do not always tolerate people who dig into sensitive issues. And as a foreigner here depending on permits to do my research, I would risk being either rejected or thrown out of the country if I dug into land businesses.

It is still not my intention to get involved in Tanzanian politics. But it has proved surprisingly difficult not to learn about it, simply because land is a political issue here. I have been researching in two villages now and I have come across stories about national politicians owning big chunks of land both places. When a suspicious land officer enquired why “Mr. Rasmus suddenly has become so interested in such matters”, I answered that I would be dishonest if I spent weeks and months in villages researching on land affairs but closed my eyes to the land issues the villagers talked about.

I am surprised that I have come across such cases in both villages – villages which were chosen from a set of different criteria. As I see it there are two possible explanations. One is that I was exceptionally “unlucky” when I chose my case villages and, therefore, ended up with two exceptional villages which are not representative of the state of land affairs in Tanzania in any way. The other possible explanation is that large land acquisitions, whether legal or illegal, are far more common here than I imagined when I started this project. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.

If that is the case, then I have to revise my perception of what is important to “ordinary Tanzanians”. The fact that citizens in both districts talk about voting for other parties than the incumbent ruling party if the government does not address these problems, is a sign that the distribution of land matters to ordinary Tanzanians. Like many other Africans, Tanzanians tend to vote for the ruling party, which is also often the party which brought independence, possibly because they believe they owe it their freedom. If the talk of voting differently this time is more than mere attempts to put pressure on politicians in a year of election, then land is even more political than I imagined.

When Maasai Women get angry they rebel

I just learned from a friend that several hundred Maasai women yesterday went to Loliondo town in Ngorongoro District to hand back their CCM membership cards, 1500 cards in total according to the paper edition of today’s Mwananchi. The women are angry, very angry actually. Last year hundreds of Maasai in Loliondo were evicted, their houses burnt and several were arrested.

In 1992, so the story goes according to the Citizen, the Government of Tanzania secretly leased over 4,000 square kilometres of the Loliondo Game Reserve to an Arab Sheikh, Brigadier Mohammed Adulrahim Al-Ally of United Arab Emirates for hunting purposes. Reportedly the boundaries are continuously being redrawn to the advantage of the Sheikh. It is from this land the Maasai are being evicted. That is the reason why the Maasai women are angry.

To protest and hand in CCM membership cards is serious business in Tanzania where the party has ruled continuously since 1977.

I realised that in March I heard a similar story from Kiteto where I have been doing my research. The Kiteto women were protesting against the loss of land in an area reserved for game and grazing land, the Murtangos. The case has been in High Court and is now in the Court of Appeal. I was not there when it happened, but I have been told that the women were stopped by concerted efforts by district authorities and the police before they could stage their protest and hand in their CCM cards in Kibaya Town.

I find these conflicts about land extremely complex and difficult to understand. It does not make it easier that the authorities treat them like state secrets. When I asked for information about the Murtangos case in Kiteto I always met suspicion. To get the verdict from the High Court proved to be impossible. Instead of reliable information I got a confusing mix of conspiracy theories and half told stories. But it seems like these Maasai women are sure about their case. They have started to rebel.

Knowledge economy

The other day, on a visit to a village in rural Tanzania, I learned that village councils are told not to disseminate information about their decisions unless they have decided otherwise. The observation corresponds well with other experiences I have made during my research; it is difficult to get access to information from public authorities and, often, personal contacts within the institutions are required. The phenomenon brings a different connotation to the term knowledge economy which in the North signifies the importance of a continuous flow of knowledge and information; in Tanzania knowledge is made a limited resource.

For some months now I have tried to get an overview of activities carried out related to implementation of land policies. It has not always been easy. I have been to several meetings with ministry officials. People are always very friendly, but often they are only able to provide me with bits of information. Sometimes it is because they do not know the answers to my questions. Often, however, I feel that they know more, but that they are not in a position to tell me what they know. Several meetings may be necessary to get to the right person.

I am not alone with this experience. Most people I have met, who are conducting research or who are working in fields which require cooperation with public authorities, have come across the phenomena; you know that statistical data or a piece of information exists, but it is difficult and time consuming to find out how to get it.

In northern Europe you would normally be able to find such basic information on public authorities’ homepages. A country like Sweden has a stated policy that information from public authorities should be accessible unless there are very good reasons to keep it secret. Here it is different. Not only is the use of internet still limited. More important, I believe, is the fact that information is so entangled in issues of power. A person’s place in the hierarchy defines what he/she is allowed to tell people from outside the organisation.

I know that these procedures are a part of the game when working here. I am always grateful when people spend time on meeting me, and though people are busy they do find the time. Sometimes I just have this feeling that life would be easier, not only for me but for most Tanzanians, with fewer restrictions on the flow of information.

Karibu Kiti (while Bureacracy works)

“Karibu kiti” is an expression everybody comes across if staying in Tanzania for longer than an average holiday. It means “please sit down” and it is the greeting you are met with when entering a public office. Then you have to sit down and wait until something happens. You can not expect anybody to explain what is going on or how long it will take. Probably they do not know either.

I experienced the procedure when applying for a research permit, which is a prerequisite for conducting research in this country. I was told that it would take a few weeks; it took five and a half months. When I finally got it I was told that I had to apply for a residence permit also, otherwise the research permit would be worthless…

Tanzanians experience it all the time. It is everywhere. Sometimes it may take a while before you find out. For instance, if you read about the Tanzanian legislation on land everything sounds great; services are prescribed and delivered, rights are protected, etc. Then you learn about the number of forms which have to be filled out, the fees which have to be paid, the procedures which have to be followed…

As a foreigner you can choose to shrug your shoulders and take encounters with the Tanzanian bureaucracy as an interesting experience. Tanzanians cannot; they have to live with it. I really admire Tanzanians for being able to do just that. Karibu kiti.