Land Affairs

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

A Crash Course in Tanzanian Politics, Please!

Some days, I find reports on my desk which are so thick that I’m about to give up before opening them. In particular, scholars and activists working within the land grab business tend to produce this type of reports. It is as if they believe that the multitude of words, the length of the list of abbreviations, and the sheer number of pages can transmit the sufferings experienced by the local communities, whose land has been illegally acquired by investors or expropriated by the state.

The Tanzanian policy analyst, Chambi Chachage, has produced a couple of this kind of reports. I have had them on my desk for quite a while, wondering if I would ever get to read them. Over the last couple of weeks I did. It turned out to be rewarding and thought provoking reading.

Chachage sets himself the huge task of investigating what has happened to the state farms when privatisation of state assets started in Tanzania in the 1990s. In the report The State of the then NAFCO, NARCO and Absentee Landlords’ Farms/Ranches in Tanzania, co-authored by Richard Mbunda, he provides an overview of the fate of 34  NAFCO (National Agriculture and Food Corporation) farms and 13 NARCO (the National Ranching Corporation) farms, covering almost 550,000 hectares. The other report, Land Acquisition and Accumulation in Tanzania. The Case of Morogoro, Iringa and Pwani Regions, is an in-depth study of farms in selected districts.

The state farms were established in the 1960s and 1970s on land expropriated from large-scale settlers and small-scale farmers and pastoralists alike. Their establishment was part of an attempt to promote state-driven development of the country under the banner of African socialism.

Economically, the NAFCO farms never became viable. No wonder, then, that they were on the list of businesses to get privatised when the era of socialism was over. NARCO, on the other hand, still exists. That, however, has not prevented a number of its farms from being sold also. The outcome is a mixed picture of farms being kept by state authorities and farms sold or leased to private investors.

Some of the investors are foreigners, but land has also been acquired by public-private partnerships involving the Tanzanian state or by Tanzanian investors. One of the former state farms mentioned in Chachage’s reports is Mzeri, which is situated in one of Handeni Districts where I carried out much of my research. There, I was told, the local MP and a former Tanzanian prime minister have acquired large tracts of land.

When reading about these deals I understand Chachage’s indignation. The privatisation path chosen by the decision makers rarely benefits the local communities, whose land was expropriated in the first place. Often people, who have moved into land left vacant by ineffective state farms, are expelled a second time when land is privatised.

Chachage blames the World Bank and other foreign actors for propagating these privatisation policies and rightly so. After having finished reading his reports, however, I am left with a feeling that there is more to it than that. Privatisations can be carried out in different ways. I have the feeling that Tanzanian decision makers have a decisive say over how it is being carried out in Tanzania. Land could, as described by Chachage, be given back to the communities. That rarely happens. The Tanzanian decision makers choose to sell the former state farms to investors. When President Kikwete met local protests in an area which had been privatised he responded: I cannot repossess the farms and give them to you. They have already been divested... Let us stop lamenting and give the investors time to revamp wheat production. You had the opportunity when the farms were still government-owned but you failed to sustain them (Kikwete in Daily News 18 September 2008 according to Chachage).

The debate makes me realise that there is much I do not understand about Tanzanian politics. I do not understand why people keep electing representatives who seem disinterested in safeguarding ordinary people’s rights. Is it because their policies are thought to bring growth and prosperity and benefit the public in the future, as the quote by Kikwete suggests?

There may be good reasons why these policies are pursued. There may also be good reasons for why people keep electing the same representatives. I would be happy to learn more about them.

Land Reforms are Political Projects

The term ‘land reform' denotes a host of very different projects. The nationalisation of land in many African countries in the 1960s and 1970s was one type of land reform. The current redistribution of land in Zimbabwe and South Africa is another. It is pretty obvious that these reforms, which change the ownership of land, are inherently political.

There are also the new wave land reforms which have been initiated in a number of countries in Sub-Saharan the last two decades. Often they aim at recognising existing rights, and sometimes at facilitating registration and titling. There is a tendency to see these reforms as apolitical, technical exercises. They are not. They, too, are extremely political.

I have just read about the Russian land reforms which were carried out 1906-1910, ie. before the Russian Revolution, in a book about Danish-Russian relations during 500 years. The chapter about the land reforms analyses the role of C. A. Koefoed, a Danish farmer and agronomist, in these reforms. They were named the Stolypin Reforms after the then Russian Prime Minister, who was their main architect. Koefoed was made head of the implementation. The land reform exercise gained momentum after peasant uprisings in 1905 and it was meant to de-radicalise the peasant.

By then land was owned as common property. Families had individual use rights, usually for limited time periods. There were also communal grazing areas in the villages. It was Stolypin’s hope that by giving peasant private ownership over land they would become more engaged in optimising their farms and less engaged in revolutionary politics.

Koefoed had campaigned for this type of reform for almost 25 years. He had lived in Russia since 1878 and it had become his new fatherland. Based on his knowledge about Danish land reforms a hundred years earlier, he knew that productivity could be raised significantly when farming land was individualised. In the first years, his points of view were not welcome in Russia. The common property character of peasant land was seen as a valuable, egalitarian, Russian institution. Koefoed therefore started looking for areas where peasant themselves had managed to divide the land. He analysed the areas and publicised findings, which showed the advantages of private property.

The Stolypin reforms gave the peasants the same rights as other people in Russia. After the reforms, a peasant could demand to get a piece of land and a title deed. The common grazing areas were also divided into individual plots. Furthermore, peasants got the right to sell their land and leave the villages. The flip side of this development was that the weaker peasants could loose out. If a farmer sold his land, his family risked having no other means to make a living. Proletarisation would ensue.

In Tanzania there were similar discussions before the 1999 land law reform was passed. The recommendations by the Presidential Land Commission in 1992 aimed at making it extremely difficult to sell land. It was meant as a safeguard against land grabbing, which was already flourishing by then. But these restraints also limited the individual farmers’ right to sell his land and, thus, his or her ability to move. Not all of the recommendations became law. Some did, however, and today there are several regulations which restrict land sales (see for instance page 45-46 in Liz Alden Wily’s Community-based Land Tenure Management).

There seems to be a trade-off between the dynamics created by individual land ownership and social equity. There are, thus, good reasons why land reforms are so heatedly debated. Reforms are not mere technical exercises. The reform design matters and restrictions to protect the rights of vulnerable groups may be required. Even impeccable land laws are likely to produce winners and losers. Land reforms are political projects with profound political implications.

NB: The implementation of the Stolypin reforms stopped with the Russian Revolution in 1917. From 1929 land was collectivised and the peasants lost the control over it. Many of the farmers, who had received individual titles, were declared kulaks. Subsequently, they were harassed and often deported. Millions died.

Poster from: Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.

Demand-driven or Donor-driven Land Reform? (2)

About a month ago, I posted a blog post which caused some debate about whether the Tanzanian land law reform was donor-driven or not. I wrote about the topic because I had met people who claimed that the two land acts were the result of a foreign scheme. The alleged foreign involvement was used as an explanation for why the reform from 1999 had not been implemented. Tanzanian ownership was lacking, so was the argument.

By then, however, I had seen any empirical evidence which sustained the claim that the policy formulation had been initiated by donors. But I had to acknowledge that the subsequent implementation efforts were donor driven to some extent.

I have now come across some other pieces of evidence which shed new light on the origins of the land reform. It is older and thus closer to the events. It, too, places the major part of responsibility for the new land reform policies on the Tanzanian decision makers of the early 1980s. I found the first piece of evidence in an article from 1993 by C. S. L. Chachage in the book Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa. It describes how private land ownership, which was institutionalised with the land reform, was introduced as part of Tanzania’s homegrown Structural Adjustment Programme in the early 1980s:

From 1982-83 the government initiated cost-cutting exercises in budget allocations, and started removing food subsidies, while 15000 government employees were axed as a retrenchment measure.  Accompanying SAP was the introduction of the 1982 National Agricultural Policy. This policy recommended liberalisation in the countryside, including encouragement of private ownership of land (Chachage in Gibbon 1993; p. 225).

These new policies were not imposed on Tanzania by donors. The reforms were the responsibility of the Tanzanian government. They were enacted after the negotiations in the early 1980s between the Tanzanian government, under the leadership of President Nyerere, and the international financial institutions had broken down. The former Tanzanian Minister of Finance, Edwin Mtei, in his exciting autobiography From Goatherd to Governor, explains that the negotiations failed because of disagreement over the exchange rate between IMF and Nyerere. As an IMF representative, Mtei later came to negotiate an Economic Recovery Programme with Tanzania. The negotiations started in 1985 and finished in 1986, i.e. after the private land ownership had been encouraged. The programme did not, to my knowledge, include a land reform.

Whereas the seeds to the land reform process were sown before the Tanzanian government had come to terms with the financial institutions and donors, the land reform policy formulation process was initiated afterwards. Furthermore, the World Bank, in the report ‘Sub Saharan Africa, From Crisis to Sustainable Growth’ from 1989, for the first time recommended changes in land law. That is also before the Tanzanian reform process started for real. That could leave room for foreign influence. The scholars, however, describe the process as a Tanzanian affair.

Gibbon, Havnevik and Hermele in A Blighted Harves. The World Bank and the African Agriculture in the 1980s from 1993 (p. 66) describe the establishment of the Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters as a response to an increase in the number of land conflicts caused by the land market and a wish to promote investments. So does C. S. L. Chachage:

On the basis of constant public complaints arising from similar cases up and down the country, President Mwinyi was in 1990-91 compelled to form a commission to investigate land problems in the country (Chachage in Gibbon 1993; p. 239).

The descriptions do not, of course, rule out the possibility that the World Bank and IMF influenced Mwinyi’s decision to establish the Commission or directed the work being done by the Ministry of Lands. As UDADISI remarked in a comment to my previous post, access to the persons involved in the decisions back then and to their documents and diaries would be required to rule out that possibility completely. The analyses I refer to above, however, do not indicate that the reform process should have been orchestrated by foreigners.

Maybe this debate about the origins of the Tanzanian land laws appears a bit outdated. But I do not think that history should be used an excuse for not implementing the laws. The Land Act and the Village Land Act do after all, if implemented, provide some tools which people can use to protect their rights to land.

Christiania - The Anthropologist’s Dream

Sitting in my office every day, reading and writing, I tend to forget that my own town, Copenhagen, can be as exotic and fascinating as can the Tanzanian countryside. Almost. Big was my surprise the other day when I arrived at work, opened my computer, and found an email from a colleague in my inbox asking me for the names and contact addresses of anthropologists researching Copenhagen land affairs. Not being an anthropologist myself, I do not know that many anthropologists. And I am not sure that I would refer to an anthropologist, if I knew one. Anthropologists, as I see them, make the world larger, but they rarely make things clearer. But I am digressing...

I do not know of anyone researching land issues in Copenhagen. I did not even think of land issues as a research topic in this orderly capital of Denmark. Land affairs here got institutionalised centuries ago. Actually, I just read an old book which describes how the king gradually got more and more control over land back in the 16th century. He made sure that all land in the realm got registered in jordebøger (land books) in order to collect his land rents from the nobility. Anthropologists back then, had they existed, would probably have engaged in lengthy academic discussions about the pros and cons of registering land in that particular way. Most anthropologists, had they existed, would spend years on the Danish countryside doing fieldwork, describing the traditional, and therefore superior, systems for handling land (these systems, by the way, had been invented by the nobility not that long before to make sure that they got their taxes from the farmers. But I am digressing....).

I did not, in other words, understand why my colleague asked for anthropologists. But now, after having read some newspaper articles about the latest developments in the ongoing conflict between Christiania and the Danish government, I understand why. Christiania is a semiautonomous part of Copenhagen, a former military area, which was occupied by the hippies when the military left in 1971. They founded a ‘fristad’ – a freetown – beyond the control of the Danish state.

The centre-left parties, which made up the majority in the Danish parliament in most of the 1970s, accepted Christiania as a social experiment. But the right wing parties never really liked the phenomenon. First, the right-wingers found, one should not accept that the Christianits never paid for the property they occupied. Second, the right-wingers never came to appreciate the alternative lifestyle in this liberated zone. The direct democracy, the lack of formal decision making structures, and the common ownership were appalling features, they thought, in the middle of the country’s capital (not to speak of cannabis, free love, and the breakdown of respect for authorities...actually I sometimes wonder if the right-wingers ever came to like the 1970s? But I am digressing…).

In fact, no right wing party in this part of the world can encounter a common pool resource (as this kind of communal property is termed academically) without wanting to privatise it. And that is, exactly what Denmark’s current right wing government has been trying to do the last decade. First it aimed at normalising Christiania by making it obey to the same rules and regulations for land use plans, buildings, roads, etc., which apply for the rest of the country. Then, the government suggested selling the area. Now, according to an article in the Danish daily, Politiken, the people living in this green oasis, around a thousand persons in total, have decided to buy the area, which they have occupied for free during the last 40 years, from the state.

According to another Politiken article, however, the Christianits set certain conditions for buying the place. One contentious issue, of course, is the price. Another even more contentious issue is whether Christiania should be able to deny people from outside Christiania the right to move in. The Christianits, seemingly, aim at keeping some kind of communal ownership of the area. But they wish to have a word to say over who can move in. It would not make sense, their lawyer says, that some political hothead, who is against the existence of Christiania, can move in and thereby work against the social, cultural and economical structures we all care about.

The conflict about the ability to exclude outsiders reflects a classic debate within natural resource management studies. In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an article, The Tragedy of the Common, in which he argued that open access to resources, for instance a grazing area in Africa, would inevitably lead to depletion of resources. The solution to the problem, he argued, was either privatisation or state control. The American political economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has subsequently spent most of her academic life pointing out that Hardin and consorts are wrong. There is a third option, she argues, namely that of common property. It is far more common than we tend to believe. And for some resources, for instance the oceans, forests, and inhospitable desert areas, some kind of common property regime may be more effective in managing resources than the market or the state.

Anthropologists really like Ostrom. Inspired by her, anthropologists have identified numerous tribes in developing countries who manage natural resources through a common property regime. These traditional, common property regimes, they claim, are much more effective than other types of regimes (irrespective of the fact that the native communities appear to be gradually loosing their access to resources most places. But I am digressing...).

I am certain that the anthropologists will also like Christiania. The Christianits, however, should see that as a warning sign. Anthropologists typically prefer tribes, whose traditional lifestyles are threatened by the development. Christiania, for sure, is much more exotic now, in all its anarchy, than it will be if the community gets a title deed and the right to fence off the entire area.

(Photo1: Bent Næsby. Photo2: Nicolai Perjesi. With permission from VisitDenmark)

Through Investors' Eyes. Land Acquisitions Revisited

A good investment?

A change of perspective on land acquisitions in developing countries can be healthy. I was exposed to the views of a potential investor recently, which made me adjust my way of thinking. Maybe the interests of investors may not be that different from the populations in developing countries? Investors – the serious ones – are also interested in strong, accountable institutions which can provide secure and stable access to land.

The one making me think about land acquisitions anew was the fiancé of a female friend of mine; a professional investor. A couple of weeks ago I had shared a newspaper article on my Facebook wall about an African continent on its way to becoming an economic super power with high economic growth rates.

The fiancé-cum-investor let me know, through his girlfriend, that I should not invest in Africa. The risk of loosing money there was too high. But I was also told that if I really wanted to pursue the idea of investing in Africa he knew of a company in Congo, a palm oil producer, with an option on 100,000 ha of arable land, which was worth considering. The company promised high average returns. High returns, if I understand investors correctly, can compensate for running big risks.

I was a bit baffled by his suggestion. First of all, I do not have the money to invest. And even if I had had the money, I would not invest in a palm oil producer in Congo. I am not really the gambling type of guy. Still, I got inspired by the suggestion. It made me wonder how investors think.

If I were an investor, I would find an investment in a company in Congo with an option on 100,000 ha of arable land extremely risky. Maybe the number of land acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa is on the increase. But so is the number of deals being cancelled. In Tanzania, a story about South Koreans investing in large-scale rice farming keeps circulating. But if there ever was a deal, it has also been cancelled several times (read about it here). In 2009, a sale of land in Madagascar fuelled a rebellion against the incumbent government. That deal was also cancelled (read about it here). Vast tracts of land in Sub-Saharan Africa are transferred to investors without ever being utilized, often because the projects stall after encountering local resistance.

Add to that the potential ethical aspect, which also plays a role for modern investors. What will happen to the ones living on those thousands of ha, once the palm oil producer decides to expand its production? A report by the World Bank from 2010 showed that investments in countries with weak laws and weak institutions – and I imagine civil war-torn Congo is such a country – are unlikely to benefit people at the local level.

A solution to the ethical problem could be to prohibit foreign land acquisitions completely. Some civil-society groups have suggested this recently (read about it here). I do not believe, however, that it will solve the problem for the local poor since it does not address the problem of large-scale domestic land acquisitions, which can be equally damaging. It could also make it more difficult to set up industries, businesses, etc. in these countries in general, which would be damaging to the economy.

I find the investor perspective intriguing. Because it makes it clear how difficult it is for businesses, foreign and domestic businesses alike, to operate in many African countries. Last week, Tanzania’s President Kikwete tried to address the problem by assuring investors that the country would maintain its investor-friendly policies (read the article in the Citizen here). But in the case of Tanzania, I believe that the president may be part of the problem. The large-scale land acquisitions in Tanzania have often been made possible by the government’s expropriations of land. An investor would wonder whether a future Tanzanian president could expropriate his land holdings as easily as land has been expropriated in the past. Stephen Johnston from the Canadian fund manager Agcapita, in an article in the Wealth Report 2011, produced by Knight Frank and Citi Bank, recently stated that 'I don’t think you can make a long-term case for investing in developing countries. Poor people vote and politicians listen. At some point, somebody will get elected who will nationalize farmland’. According to the same article, investors see most African countries as ‘a potential Zimbabwe’. The lack of stable institutions and checks and balances, in other words, reduces tenure security, not only for the poor, but for all.

A different way of addressing insecure land rights would be to strengthen the capacity of the local authorities and citizens and increase their role when land deals are made. Maybe the parliaments should also be given a larger role in controlling the deals. The power of the executive should be diminished correspondingly, and the huge, surreal, transfers of land should be stopped (maybe ceilings on land purchases would work?). Interestingly, the interests of serious investors, in strong institutions and in a system with more checks and balances, may not be very different from the interests of ordinary Africans.

Land and Sexual Violence (4). A Report from Cote d’Ivoire...

People on the run from the severe post-election fighting. March 2011. © Alexis Adélé/IRIN.

This week, a report appeared about the use of sexual violence as part of the post-election conflict in Cote d’Ivoire. Again, there seems to be some kind of relationship between political conflict, land, and rape as a weapon of war.

In Cote d’Ivoire, the atrocities started in November 2010 when the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down after having lost the national elections (read about the conflict here). Soon, what started off as a dispute over the election outcome activated ethnic and religious cleavages.

According to the report from the UN news agency, IRIN, there is a link between ethnicity, land and sexual violence:
Most refugees are reporting that the violence is ethnically and politically driven, say NGOs and rights groups. The political fault-lines in this region are largely along ethnic and religious grounds. Violence in the west has also been linked to longstanding clashes over land that have pitted local communities against outsiders. Waines, just back from talking to refugees in Nimba Country, said: “There is a large ethnic dynamic to this violence - targeted ethnic killings and attacks are driving the dynamic.”

The article only reports that these crimes have taken place. Unfortunately, it does not provide much insight into the behind lying ethnic conflicts and exactly how they relate to land issues.

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.

Land and sexual violence (3)

In previous blog posts, I have written about rapes related to major conflicts over land and in land conflicts at the local, everyday level. I was reminded about the link between land and sexual violence again this week when reading about Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform.

According to the book Gender and Land Reform - the Zimbabwe Experience by Allison Goebel, election campaigns and the land seizures were accompanied by state-sanctioned rape:

...state-sanctioned violence that accompanied the 2003 pre-election campaign, the presidential elections, and the seizure of white-owned farms has taken an especially heavy toll on women and children. It is alleged that wives and daughters who sympathized with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) or who were connected to MDC supporters, as well as women farm workers were victimized by ZANU youth brigades. Although the youth brigades were particularly intent on silencing vocal opposition to the ruling party, who were disproportionately male, there was a clear gendered dimension to their violence. Women believed to be associated with the opposition were not beaten, but were instead often raped or gang raped by members of the youth brigades and state functionaries (Mary J. Osirim according to Goebel).

Though she mentions it, the author does not elaborate much on the relationship between land and the use of sexual violence in Zimbabwe. This, again, brings me back to the curious fact that so little research has been carried out into the topic…

Zimbabwe’s land reform. Myths and Surprising Realities...

Land affairs can be intriguingly complicated. Land reform debates, on the other hand, are often remarkably predictable. Once you know a person’s view on formal titling, you know the rest. Sometimes, however, a new article or a new book appears that differs. Based on empirical research it challenges your preconceived opinions. It happened to me this week when I got hands on the book Zimbabwe’s Land Reform, Myths and Realities.

First, whereas most writings about land reform are based on predictions about reform outcomes, this book analyses a land reform post facto. Second, the book does not aim at debating pros and cons of titling. Instead, it asks which effects the Zimbabwean land reform has had on a number of parameters. Finally, the findings and the entire approach do not fit well with the accounts we receive in Europe about the Zimbabwe’s reform.

Zimbabwe’s land reform is in many ways an unusual reform. Whereas most current land reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa focus on streamlining land governance, for instance through decentralisation, facilitation of land markets and titling, the explicit aim of the Zimbabwean reform is to redistribute land to the poorer segments of the population (for an overview of different types of land reforms, see chapter 2 in Evolving Land Rights, Policy and Tenure in Africa). Land ownership in the country was highly uneven distributed prior to reform. 4500, mostly white, commercial large-scale farmers owning the major part of the productive land. Something had to happen.

Whereas we do know that some of the confiscated land was distributed to Mugabe’s cronies, it is often overlooked that around one million Zimbabweans, many of them dirt-poor, also settled on and farmed the land. Almost 50% of the resettled households are doing pretty well, producing a surplus they can invest in the future. So the book’s case studies show. There are several reasons why we have not heard about these more positive reform outcomes. A major explanation is the fact that the production parameters applied from observers outside the country were those of the past; large-scale production of wheat and tobacco. But the current small-scale farmers have diversified and the production of for instance small grains, which fulfil household needs, has soared.

That is all very surprising to me. It is likely to be troubling news to others. I wonder what all those Sub-Saharan African governments, who repeatedly claim that large-scale farming is the only way to economic growth, will do. And how will the population in for instance Kenya, with its highly skewed distribution of land, react when they learn about the potential advantages of small-scale farming?

Still I feel a bit uneasy about the book. It has to do with the questions the authors do not really answer. Could all the sufferings in Zimbabwe have been avoided if the government had been more proactive at an earlier stage? What happened to the 150000 farm workers (and their families, in total around one million people were affected) who lost their jobs? Does it make sense, analytically, to separate land redistribution from the Mugabe regime’s violent excesses? Can it, in other words, be justified that the authors focus on only one aspect of the last decade’s development, the land reform, while they largely ignore that the country is falling apart?

Land and sexual violence (2)

My last blog post was about the use of rape and sexual violence in major conflicts. During a meeting with some colleagues a couple of days ago, I realised that sexual violence may also be part of small-scale, everyday conflicts with neighbours, kins and family members. At the meeting I was asked if we know anything about it. I did not. So far, I have not come across any literature which deals with the topic.

I do know that violent marriages can be quite common in rural areas. In the book ‘Women Forget that Men are the Masters’ Margrete Silberschmidt describes how social change in a district in Kenya challenges men’s traditional identities. Often, women are better at small-scale business and managing the fields. Still many men, though they are loosing their traditional role as breadwinners, cling on to the traditional gender relations: ‘Regardless of the socio-economic circumstances in which they find themselves, men are constantly preoccupied with the fact that they are men, and that this condition differentiates them radically from women’ (Silberschmidt p. 17).  Sex and violence, then, may become parts of some men’s strategies to assert themselves and their masculinity.

Thinking back to my fieldwork, I remember the story of a woman, whose husband had died. Soon, the husband’s brother moved in and took over the role as the head of the family. But the two did not get on well, and the woman asked him to leave. The man turned violent, however, and, in the end, she was the one who had to flee the house and the land with her kids. I do not know whether sexual violence was a part of it. It was not my research topic and I did not inquire into it. I wish I had.

This brings me back to the fact, that I do not think that land and sexual violence at the local, everyday level has been thoroughly researched. Anybody out there who knows more about it?

Land and sexual violence

Survivors of sexual violence at the Hospital of Panzi, South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo from UN Multimedia.

An article in this week’s Economist, War’s overlooked victims, is about the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Most often women are targeted.

From newspaper reports I had noticed current conflicts’ large numbers of rapes during conflicts. Repeatedly, we read stories about rapes in the ongoing civil war in Congo. There were reports about sexual violence during the 2007-2008 political crisis in Kenya (read here). In Bosnia in the 1990s, rape was also widespread. I thought it was a new trend. It turns out, however, that it is not.

What is new is the realisation that rape is often used systematically as a weapon of war. Only in 2008 was it officially acknowledged as such by the UN Security Council.

Often, so it seems, the use of sexual violence during conflicts is related to land. The logic behind is abhorrent. Men are mobile. Sometimes they are engaged in militia activities themselves, sometimes they work in the cities. When conflicts break out, which involve different ethnic groups and control over land, women are easy targets. By raping women, militias can force them and their families to flee an area. According to a research paper by Elisabeth Wood, an American professor at Yale University, a UN Commission noticed the connection between land and sexual violence after the wars in the former Yugoslavia:

In both custodial and non-custodial settings, many victims report that the alleged perpetrators state that they were ordered to rape and sexually assault the victims, or that they were doing it so that the victims and their families would never want to return to the area. Also, every reported case occurred in conjunction with an effort to displace the civilian population of a targeted ethnic group from a given region…

Subsequently, the perpetrators can distribute the land among to members of their own ethnic grouping. Shocking.

Land Conflicts in developing and developed countries. What is the difference?

I was in Iceland to celebrate New Year’s Eve with some friends. Up there, I was reminded of the fact that conflicts over land use and land ownership are not only a developing country phenomenon. Nor are various kinds of communal land ownership unknown in Europe, though we tend to forget it.

My host, an Icelandic farmer, told me about his grievances with Icelandic state authorities over grazing land. A government committee is currently attempting to clarify land ownership in Iceland, especially in the highlands, following the adoption of a law (see page 17 on this link) which states that the Icelandic state owns all land that individuals can not legally uphold their claim for.

The aim of the law is to twofold: to protect the environment and to secure that natural resources found in those areas will benefit the public. I do not think that a change in ownership status will make any difference to the farmers’ use of land. They will probably still have the right to graze it. Still, everybody is searching for all kinds of old documents which can somehow proof that they or their forefathers somehow have had earned a right to the land. My friend and his fellow farmers have the feeling that the state is taking something away from them.

His story reminded me of something which I tend to forget: that conflicts over land use and land ownership is not a developing country phenomenon only. We have conflicts over land in Europe too. We also have common pool resources; pastures, oceans, etc. Actually, one of the reasons why I find the study of land management systems in Tanzania fascinating is because it makes me look at my own society with fresh eyes.

It occurs to me, though, that European conflicts often differ from the ones I have met in African countries. In Europe, we may no to the same extent have elements of personal gains and losses which decisively influence individuals’ and communities’ incomes and livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa. In north-western Europe land use conflicts usually involve the state and evolve around issues other than ownership.

An example of this type of land use conflicts, can be found in a marsh area, Tøndermarsken, in the south-western part of Denmark. In that area farmers and public authorities have been fighting for more than thirty years over how to use the land. The traditional farming system, with farmers associations regulating grazing and the water levels in the canals, has created an ecosystem which provides the basis for a fantastic bird life. But modern farming techniques, with intensive cultivation, now threaten that ecosystem. In order to protect the birds, the Danish Ministry of the Environment has increasingly sought to regulate how the area should be farmed; the water level in the channels; the type of crops grown in the fields; the density of animals, etc. The Marsh farmers, on the other hand, feel that they are loosing the control over their land, which farmers won some 200 years ago when farming and land ownership got more individualised in Denmark.

The conflict in Tøndermarsken is not about ownership ‘classic’. Still, the new environmental regulation completely changes the meaning of ownership. In a condensed form the conflict in Tøndermarsken shows us what has happened with governance of agricultural land in Denmark during the last thirty to forty years.

Sometimes I have this feeling that our categories of land and land rights deceive us. We often focus on one category, private property rights for instance and tend to forget all the other types of ownership and use rights. You may see that when you learn about systems in other countries. Are they not all equally fascinating and worth studying?

Iceland photo by Ragnar Th. Sigurðsson, with permission from www.visiticeland.com
Tøndermarsken photo by Jon Detlefsen, www.marsken.dk

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.

Are they crooks? (2)

Changes may be underway in the way land is managed in Tanzania. The new Minister of Lands, Mrs. Anna Tibaijuka, who comes from a position as Executive Director in UN-HABITAT, has made some tough statements on illegally acquired land less than a month after her appointment:

30 November, according to an article in the Citizen, she warned that land which had been grabbed illegally, but which rightfully belonged to the public, would be repossessed.

13 December, also in an article in the Citizen, she claimed that the government would repossess property, like beach hotels, which had been built on illegally acquired land.

14 December, in a third story in the Citizen, she specifically addressed those people who had built houses in the posh areas along the beaches in Dar es Salaam. Public land should be used for public purposes like playgrounds or car parks, she said, not for private settlements.

Now, there is an important task for citizens and Tanzanian media in monitoring what happens to the land after it has been repossessed by the government. Will the minister and the Ministry of Lands start constructing playgrounds and car parks on those areas? I look forward to learning about it.

Personally I believe there is another, even more important task ahead of Mrs. Anna Tibaijuka, namely to change the culture of impunity within the land sector. The Ministry of Lands is reportedly among the most corrupt institutions in the country. In rural areas, local district land offices are rumored to be involved in illegal land transactions. Still, you rarely hear stories of land officials being prosecuted and punished. In Tanzanian villages, I have heard numerous stories of local leaders who sell village land without following the proper procedures. Village chairmen and village executive officers as well as traditional leaders may be involved, and their names may be known. Still, no one gets punished. Why?

It would have a tremendous effect if the Tanzanian government started punishing those corrupt official or semi-official representatives who are involved in illegal land transactions.

Photo from UN-HABITAT.

An unhappy Mariage? Women and formalised land ownership

This Tanzanian woman once lost her land in a divorce. Now she is happy that she has a title on her land.

The debate about how to protect vulnerable groups in land reform processes is continuing. In a previous blog post I described the effect of putting the names of women on title deeds in Tanzania. It was my impression that it made a big difference for women to know that they, in a written document, figured as the owners of the plots they use.

Now, from a friend, I have received an example of what happens when women’s names are not written. It does not look good. The findings in The Impact of National Land Policy and Land Reform on Women in Uganda are based on a small survey conducted by Uganda Land Alliance and the international NGO COHRE.

Uganda got its land law reform with the 1998 Land Act. Though women activists had campaigned for spouses’ automatic co-ownership of land the final law did not open up for this option. In the book No Shortcuts to Power Sheila Kawamara-Mishambi and Irene Ovonji-Odida describe how the president deleted the article empowering women, after it had been passed by parliament, because he was afraid that women would accumulate land through serial monogamy. Today, according to the survey from Uganda Land Alliance and COHRE, only 8% of married women in Uganda report that they own land.

Instead, lawmakers have sought to secure women’s rights to land by emphasising their rights according to other laws. The problem with this approach is that it presumes that women know their rights, and know how to enforce them. However, the study shows that women, especially in rural areas, do not know about their rights. Subsequently, discriminatory customary practices persist.

Women and land

Geneva is getting divorced and she is fighting local traditions in order to secure her rights to land.

In a blog post some months ago I wrote about how much women value formal procedures for registration of rights to land and proofs of ownership such as documents and titles. It makes a big difference to them that their name is written. This week I found an interesting article, Customary Law still bars Women’s Access to Land, on Allafrica.com which touches upon a related discussion, namely women’s position under customary law in case of inheritance.

According to the article women in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are struggling to safeguard their interests in land when their closest adult male relative – the husband or the father – dies. Often, the family takes the land leaves the woman with nothing. I heard similar stories during my fieldwork in rural Tanzania. Women who are getting divorced experience similar problems with loosing their land. Often they are simply told to go back to their parents.

Therefore, I have always been intrigued by those land rights scholars who recommend strengthening customary systems, for instance council of elders, for handling land, as a better alternative to establishing a formal state backed system for registration of rights and issuance of titles. A formal system requires substantial investments in training, registries, and mapping – i.e. scarce resources in developing countries which are struggling to provide even basic social services to their citizens. Therefore it is more realistic, so the scholars argue, to strengthen the customary systems for managing land and strengthen women’s rights to land simultaneously. You can read an example of this approach here.

I guess these scholars have a point. Still I wonder what is more realistic: To reform local customs and change male attitudes towards women, or to create a proper formal land administration system?

The land question in Sub-Saharan Africa

There is not one land question in Sub-Saharan Africa! That is an established truth among land rights scholars. They regularly state it to challenge one-size-fits-all solutions within the land sector; universal titling, nationalisations, privatisations, collectivisations, etc. Problems related to land, they argue, are diverse and context specific. What is the right solution in one country at a certain time may be fatal in another.

Similarly, I have regularly been told that, when it comes to land, Tanzania is not Kenya. The ones telling me so are Tanzanians, who wish to underline the difference between the two countries when it comes to inequality. In Kenya there is a conspicuous correlation between possession of political power and land ownership. The leading politicians are also among the biggest land owners in the country.

Tanzania is different, I am told. Primarily because the first President, Julius Nyerere, restricted politicians’ and ministers’ involvement in business. But the more I learn about recent developments in the Tanzania, the more I am convinced that the story of Tanzanian equality has become a myth. This week the Citizen brought an article about villagers in Mvomero District who complain about Frederick Sumaye, Prime Minister from 1995 - 2005, who owns a large piece of land in their area.

During my research in two districts I have come across another former Prime Minister owning large tracts of land, and I have also heard of several MPs and a former President owning land on a large scale. I have come across these findings by pure coincidence; because it is not my field of study, I have not even been looking for this kind of large scale land ownership.

Of course Tanzania is different from Kenya. But when it comes to the convergence between political power and land ownership the difference may be smaller than what is commonly believed.

Land Banks and Land Investments

I always get a bit confused when I hear activists and politicians discuss investments in land in Tanzania. In an article in the Citizen recently, the Director of the NGO Hakiardhi, Mr Yefred Mnyenzi, criticised the government’s land bank for not benefitting smallholder farmers. Smallholders, he said, had a lot of land conflicts because foreigners were grabbing their land for investments.

I have no doubts that land grabbing is a serious problem, also in Tanzania. To judge from their public announcements about vast areas of vacant land on the countryside, many politicians in Tanzania see land as a resource for investments without considering user and owner rights attached to it.

In a developing country with high economic growth, land for investments is undoubtedly required. Since Tanzania, for various reasons, is behind with planning this may also entail expropriations. In a leaked World Bank report, Tanzania was highlighted, as one of the very few developing countries where investments in land benefit the broader community. The crucial question, however, is how the land is being taken from farmers and rights holders.

Recently a district land officer explained the procedure they use in the districts to me; potential land for investments is being identified, but negotiations about acquisitions are left to the local communities and the buyer to carry out. If the village has made a land use plan, and no one is forced to move, I see nothing wrong in it selling a part of its land.

On the other hand the stories of people loosing their land to investments without having a say and without getting a proper compensation are abundant.

So which of the two versions of land acquisitions do you choose as your point of departure in land rights debates; the one where land is legitimately needed for development and is acquired following all legal norms and procedures, or the one where corrupt politicians and officials grab the land in order to sell illegally it to greedy foreign investors? Both may be true...

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.