Land Affairs

Land Reform. But for Whom? (2)

Sometimes I find books on land and land reforms - new books - which have an air of another era about them. The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry is such a book. It is not without insights. But its language and concepts feel more like revolutionary literature from the 1970s than like academic analysis from this millennium.

The book’s part one, written by Utsa Patnaik, addresses the theoretical failure in understanding the links between the agenda of finance capital, on the one hand, and the agrarian crisis in developing countries, on the other (p. 9). Agrarian crises is a classic Marxist topic and the term describes how capitalism dispossesses the small-scale producers of their land.

Personally, I find it honorable when scholars are preoccupied with the rural poor - the peasantry as Utsa Patnaik phrases it. And the author has some extremely interesting findings.  For instance, she shows that populations in developing countries have experienced a decline in grain availability. That is extremely worrying.

What bothers me a bit about Utsa Patnaik’s contribution, however, is its tendency to focus on the negative outcomes of development only. The approach appears rather eclectic. For instance, she writes that cereal output per capita fell sharply in China in the period 1990-2003 and that that the food availability for the poorer mass has declined sharply.

Utsa Patnaik does not, however, discuss why her findings differ from most current descriptions of China, according to which living standards are rising and hundreds of millions are being lifted out of poverty. FAO statistics, furthermore, according this chart, shows a rising calories per person intake in China in the same period. Why do Utsa Patnaik’s findings differ from such, more general, analyses? Is it because of her narrow focus on grain production, which seems to exclude other crops? Or is it because of the uneven distribution of wealth in the country? She does not tell us.

Similarly, she has a statistic showing the decline in per day capita intake in a number of African countries from 1979 to 1991. That is the period of structural reform programmes, which endeniably reduced food security for people in a number of countries in sub-Saharan. She does not, however, include the subsequent decades which, again according to the chart based on FAO statistics, show a rising caloies intake in some of the same countries. Why has she chosen one decade and left out others? Such questions are left unanswered.

The second part, written by Sam Moyo, is not much different. It is an analysis of the third wave of land alienation in all the African regions (p. 73), that is, of the current land grabbing phenomenon. This third wave, he writes, follows the first wave colonial era land dispossessions and the second wave domestic capitalist land grabbing in numerous countries, facilitated by the new land reform policies of the 1990s (p. 68). Again, the approach is rather eclectic. For instance, I find it strange that the state nationalization programmes pursued by some governments in the 1970s, which dispossessed quite a few people of their land – Tanzania being one of them as I have described in a previous blog post – are not seen as land alienation.

What really bothers me, however, is Sam Moyo’s description of Zimbabwe’s land reform as a role model for others to follow: The agrarian accumulation model continues to be based on an outward-looking agricultural strategy, except in Zimbabwe, which is veering towards internal markets, food sovereignty and autonomous development (p. 74). He thus completely ignores the hundreds of thousands who lost their jobs in the farming sector, the 1,5 million people - a tenth of the entire Zimbabwean population – who left for South Africa, and the fact that Zimbabwe - once a breadbasket in Southern Africa - today suffers from acute food insecurity, according to this article from the World Food Programme.

I agree that land in Zimbabwe was highly unevenly distributed and that redistribution was needed. However, as the political scientist Max Weber pointed out in his ethics of responsibility, political actions should not only be measured on their intentions. First and foremost, political actions should be measured on their consequences. By most measures, President Mugabe’s reform approach was misconceived and it failed.

Issa Shivji, in the introduction to the book, writes about the latest phase of capitalist accumulation and the choice humankind faces. We have to choose, he writes, between socialism and barbarism. If only things were that simple.

Land Reform for whom?

In this weekend’s by-election in Arumeru-East, which Tanzania’s ruling party, CCM, lost to Chadema, land reform suddenly became part of the agenda. According to an article in the East African, representatives from both parties, including the winning Joshua Nasari, pledged that they would redistribute land in the area.

A newly-elected MP can hardly expect to push through a land reform on his own. Neither can even quite powerful politicians, in the short run at least. Land ownership is well protected by Tanzania’s land laws. And with good reason. Land redistribution carried out hastily and without compensating the ones loosing the land may scare the investors that Tanzania has worked so hard to attract in the last couple of decades.

I do not know much about the history of land in the Mount Meru area. But I do know that it is of utmost importance to make a well-designed programme before embarking on such a project. Without a proper plan, redistributive reform may do more harm than good. The experience from Zimbabwe shows us.
Zimbabwe, after its liberation from white minority rule in 1979-80, carried out a redistributive land reform. Land distribution was highly skewed and reform was needed. Back then, the reform was largely based on the willing seller/buyer principle and without the use of force that came to characterise the reform of the 2000s. The pace was extremely slow.

The first Zimbabwean plan aimed at the resettlement of landless people. The aim, according to the book ‘Gender and Land Reform: The Zimbabwean Experience’ by Allison Goebel, was clearly a fairer distribution of land. But that agenda changed in the last half of the 1980s. Principles eroded. Slowly, reform became a question of indigenisation, not of redistribution:

...commercial agriculture (and by implication the land allocation issue) entered the ‘indigenisation’ discourse. Indigenisation simply means the shifting of control of key aspects of the economy from white to black hands, and thus the interests of the rural poor were sidelined in favour of those of large-scale black farmers... (Bratton and Nkale according to Goebel 2005: 20).

If you are an old-fashioned nationalist, the change of ownership, from white to black, may be desirable in itself. If you wish to give the poor a bigger share of national wealth, on the other hand, you should think twice before entering the Zimbabwean land reform path. In Zimbabwe, the cake got smaller. Capital started fleeing the country and jobs disappeared. Most people got less.

Nyerere, Operation Vijiji and Violent Land Administration

I am always cautious when I write about Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere. When you are dealing with people in the same league as saints - there are people in Tanzania working for Nyerere’s beatification - you better tread carefully. People are feeling strongly about him and you may easily be misunderstood. In that way Nyerere is a bit like Jesus. You are not supposed to criticise him. And, you can find quotes by him to support almost any point of view you can think off.

In this blog post, I do not aim at criticising Nyerere. But I would like to shed some light on an aspect of the big politicians’ oeuvre that most Tanzanians’ prefer to forget: Operation Vijiji. The ambivalence most Tanzanians feel towards this grand project of social engineering of his is reflected - involuntarily - in Professor Issa Shivji’s article The village in Mwalimu Nyerere's thought. In the article from 2009, Shivji manages, on the one hand, to praise the ruling party, the government and Nyerere for the ‘tremendous achievement’ in carrying out villagisation and, on the other, to blame an American, capitalist consultancy firm, MacKinsey, for villagisation’s failure. Tellingly, Shivji prefers discussing the vision behind Operation Vijiji and ignoring its fatal consequences.

Operation Vijiji has received surprisingly little academic attention. I have only found a few academic articles analysing aspects of these villagisation processes of the 1960s and 1970s, and, so far, no larger, authoritative account of the whole period. That is a shame. The project shaped the Tanzanian countryside in unforeseen ways. During my research in the rural areas, I have met people whose houses were burnt and who were forced to move during villagisation. Some people still have ‘sleeping’ claims on the land they, or their parents, lost back then. The effects of Operation Vijiji, in other words, are still felt today.

One of the articles I have come across is Tanzania’s Operation Vijiji and Local Ecological Consciousness by Yusufu Qwaray Lawi, who analyses its implementation in Iraqland in Northern Tanzania. Interestingly, he describes how villagisation met widespread resistance, often based on local knowledge about the ecology of the area. People knew that some places were unfit for settlement. But the bureaucrats did not listen and resorted to the use of force to make people comply. Sometimes people were even told to relocate to sacred places or ancient burial grounds.

A similar scathing critique is delivered by Leander Schneider in Freedom and Unfreedom in Rural Development. He focuses on the role of Nyerere. And whereas there has been a tendency to excuse Nyerere and blame the bureaucrats for the use of force, Schneider is unrelenting. He traces Nyerere as a driving force, increasingly impatient with the peasants’ lack of enthusiasm for his ideas about ‘participatory’ development in the Ujamaa Villages. In 1972-3, apparently, the President gave up voluntarism as a guiding principle when he declared that the stage of explaining and persuading…is really ending everywhere (p. 363). The same year, after a party conference he stated that The issue of living in Ujamaa villages is now an order (p. 371). Nyerere also put immense pressure on the bureaucracy and did not hesitate removing his local representatives, the Regional and Area Commissioners, if they did not deliver on villagisation (p. 367). Nyerere was a paradox, Schneider concludes: …villagisation reveals that the President was central in driving rural development into increasingly coercive directions, which, at other times, he so forcefully spoke out against (p. 347).

There is no doubt that Nyerere made priceless contributions to the peaceful development of Tanzania. People in neighbouring countries envy the Tanzanians for that. I am also convinced that his zeal for improving the livelihoods of the rural poor, who made up the majority of the population, was genuine. To acknowledge the more problematic sides of his presidency, outlined above, does not make Nyerere a less important president. All politicians make mistakes. But it may make him more human.

Photo from http://www.dsctanzania.org/images/Nyerere.jpg

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.

Land Law Reforms as Cover-Ups for Land Grabbing? Impressions from Uganda

Surveying on a shoestring.

Ever since I started writing my PhD on land in Tanzania, I have encountered a particular, cynical interpretation of land affairs in the Sub-Saharan African countries. The new wave of land reforms passed in the last couple of decades (read about some of the reforms here), so the story goes, is a scam. According to some scholars, reform efforts are merely a way for the elites to legalise the land they have grabbed. The article Tanzania: Spreading Power or Spreading Poverty, for instance, refers to the reform as the formalisation of villagers’ dispossession (page 230).

I have always rejected the story as a conspiracy. Primarily because I did not, in Tanzania, find unambiguous evidence that supported it. Sometimes, however, I begin to doubt. It happened to me, again, last week while carrying out research in Uganda.

Uganda got its land reform with the 1998 Land Act. Like most other reforms of the late 1990s and later, it recognises existing rights to land and makes registration of customary rights to land possible. The latter is a new land law feature. Until recently, most countries had two parallel systems for the administration of land. On the one hand, they had a bureaucratic system where the white minorities had lived, typically in the cities and in settler areas. It was modelled on western land administration systems with title deeds and land registers. In other areas, they had ‘customary’ systems, which were a very diverse set of practices to handle land in ‘native’ areas. Typically, rights to land in these areas were not written down; they were witnessed by local leaders and demarcated with natural marks like stones, trees and the like. Often, state authorities did not respect the customary rights. During colonial times, land was regularly expropriated for settler agriculture. After independence, land was often expropriated for ‘development’ purposes, usually without compensation.

It was, therefore, not merely empty words when the new land reforms recognised existing rights to land. It was a signal that people had the right to the land they were living on. In Uganda, the recognition of customary rights in the 1998 Land Act meant that people could now apply for a Certificate of Customary Ownership. Unlike traditional title deeds customary certificates can largely be produced by local level authorities. Unlike the traditional title deeds, which require surveying which is prohibitively expensive for most people, a customary certificate requires a hand-drawn map of the boundaries and the acceptance and signatures of the neighbours. That is, in theory, how it was supposed to be. In practice, however, the situation is very different.

After having visited several districts, it is now clear to me that the certificates of customary ownership do not exist. They were never designed in the ministry of Lands. Subsequently, the Ministry has confirmed this. That is the reason why I start wondering whether the land reform was a scam. How else would you explain that the thing that could be of most use to the majority of poor people in the country – the customary certificates - is still not available 14 years after the passing of the Land Act? And that the government, in the meanwhile, keeps supporting expensive surveying and titling projects in geographically limited areas?

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.

Drivers of Land Grabbing and Large-Scale Land Investments

How about a shady contract?

I hate to admit it when I am wrong. But I have to. Some months ago, I wrote a blog post about land investments. Back then, I assumed that serious investors would prefer investments in well-governed countries with strong institutions, also at the local level, that could enforce property rights. I was wrong.

In a recently published Working Paper, What Drives the Global ‘Land Rush, Rabah Arezki, Klaus Deininger and Harris Selod conclude the opposite. And they base their conclusion on empirical research, not on assumptions. Had I been writing about foreign investments in general, I would have been right. In such cases the business climate matters. But when it comes to land, investors seem to prefer weak governance:

...in contrast to what is found for foreign investment more generally, rule of law and good governance have no effect on the number of land-related investment. Moreover, and counter-intuitively, we find that countries where governance of the land sector and tenure security are weak have been most attractive for investors (p. 3).

That does not mean that Sub-Saharan African countries should stop improving local governance of land. On the contrary. The authors demonstrate that if positive outcomes are to be produced, investors should fulfil specific requirements formulated by the state. In Peru, for instance, transparent auctions of large tracts of land, subsequently, brought large investments in horticulture and created many jobs.

Giving away land too cheaply or for free, on the other hand, as happens many places in Sub-Saharan Africa, is unlikely to bring any benefits to the local communities or to society at large. That was, by the way, also the conclusion of another report, What is in the Contract, published by Lorenzo Cotula earlier this year.

The problem, of course, is that countries with weak governance structures are unlikely to make such requirements and enforce them. And that the investors do not seem to care.

NB:
I am not sure that Tanzania should be categorised as a country with weak governance institutions. On the one hand, the Tanzania Investment Centre has complained that land laws are too strict, making it difficult to attract investors. On the other hand, when you read reports like Accumulation by Land Dispossession and Labour Devaluation in Tanzania from HAKIARDHI and Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa – Tanzania Country Report from the Oakland Institute, you get the impression that the country is an all-you-can-eat buffet for investors.

Land Markets

Above and below some impressions from Uganda where I am currently involved in a research project about land, land markets and economic growth. Land is increasingly becoming an investment object in many Sub-Saharan African countries. That is obviously also the case in Uganda. The photos show some of the negative consequences when land markets become too lively. I have not seen similar signs in Tanzania.

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.

...and the Tanzanian Government’s Position on Land is...

It came the day after, actually, the government’s position on the land distribution issue I had asked for in my previous blog post. All the major English-language newspapers had it on their frontpages: PM rushes to the rescue of Sh48bn lands budget (the Citizen); PM allayes fears over land (the Guardian); PM defends large scale farmers (Daily News).

The newspapers reported that the Prime Minister had stepped into the parliamentary debate to support the minister of Lands, Anne Tibaijuka. He made it clear that large-scale farming is imperative for this country and that foreign investors play a key role in achieving this. This position is of no surprise, though, it could be deducted from previous government practices, but it has rarely been spelled out in the public.

With his comments the Prime Minister turned the debate into whether you are for or against foreign investors and economic development. That, however, is a bit beside the point. As I see it, the real question is which kind of foreign investments you are interested in attracting? As the recent report Land Deals in Africa: What’s in the Contracts? points out, if a land deal is to improve the living conditions at the local level, it should explicitly state so. It should also be very specific about what should be achieved in terms of job creation, training and infrastructure. Past experiences have shown that not all land deals bring development.

Personally, I believe that some kinds for large-scale investments may be beneficial, for instance contract farming, where the small-scale farmers keep the control over their land and receive inputs and training from investors. The large-scale land deals, on the other hand, which render more small-scale farmers landless than they create formal jobs, are unlikely to have a positive effect on local livelihoods.

This brings me back to the question of the distribution of land in this country. According the Guardian the prime minister proudly stated during the debate that all land in Tanzania will remain state property and that the government would not budge on this issue. However, that is of little comfort for the small-scale farmers and the pastoralists whose land has been expropriated by the government and sold off to investors. Do their rights to land not deserve similar guarantees from the government?

‘MPs accuse ex-presidents over land grabbing’

The debate about land in Tanzania has finally broken into the open. The above headline is a copy-pasted from today’s cover story in the Citizen. According to the article, members of the Tanzanian parliament accuse ex-presidents and former prime ministers for grabbing large chunks of land. For once, land is not covered as a small story about regularities in a remote district, hidden inside the paper. This story is front page and hits core land affairs issues. Both members of the opposition and the ruling party take part.

The rumours about leading politicians owning large tracts of land are not new. I have written about them in previous blog posts. But it is new that the debate addresses the issue directly. And it is new that it is debated openly in the parliament. They debate is likely to be heated.

Personally, as an academic, I find the land grabbing term imprecise because it bunches too many disparate phenomena together. For instance investments, which have followed all legal procedures, are put on an equal footing with outright illegal theft of land. Still, I find that the MPs and the press deserve applause for starting a serious debate about the distribution of land in this country. Irrespective of one’s position on the issue, the debate should be welcomed. It is high time. I look forward to the government’s response.

Secrecy in Lawmaking. Lessons from the drafting of Tanzania’s new constitution and the amendments of the land laws

NGOs working with land here in Tanzania are up in arms. There are rumours that amendments of the Village Land Act, which governs most land in the rural areas, are underway. As usual, it is hard to find out exactly what is on the table. Rumours are abound, but no one outside the government really knows what is coming.

The closest I have got is a summary of a speech, held by the Permanent Secretary in the Prime Ministers’ Office at a Tanzania-India Friendship Association Symposium, in which he evaluates the implementation of Kilimo Kwanza, President Kikwete’s pet project introduced two years ago to bring a Green Revolution to Tanzanian agriculture. I have been searching for the speech in its entirety but I have not, so far, been able to find it. So we shall have to do with the summary brought in the Guardians’ bimonthly Kilimo Kwanza section (I always wonder who pays for the publishing of that section, by the way. It should not be too cheap getting such praises of government initiatives printed).

So far, Kilimo Kwanza has not brought much new under the sun. It focuses on promoting mechanisation and large-scale investments in agriculture. That approach has been tested repeatedly by colonial and post-independence governments alike, but with very modest success, to put it mildly. The amendments to the Village Land Act seem to continue down the same beaten track. According to the Guardian the amendments are aiming to facilitate access to village land for agricultural investment (The Guardians’ Kilima Kwanza section, 5 July 2011, page 3).

NGOs have pointed out that unless Kilima Kwanza starts addressing the need of small-scale farmers, who make up the vast majority of farmers in Tanzania, the initiative is unlikely to bring much development (read some examples of the critique here and here). It has also been pointed out by a Swahili Street blog post that the approach, with its focus on delivery of tractors and power tillers, is top-down and does address the needs of most farmers.

But I am digressing; we should get back to the amendments of the land acts. They seem to be made in a similar top-down manner as Kilimo Kwanza. The government has come pretty far in the lawmaking process, with a draft currently being reviewed by the Attorney General. It seems get amended without prior public debate and without asking the NGO’s and experts working within the field for comments and advice. Secrecy is the preferred approach and that intrigues me a bit.

It reminds me of the process preparing for a new constitution for Tanzania, which came to a halt in April this year after fierce critique. The Constitution Review Bill, it turned out, did not provide for the involvement of Tanzanians in the drafting process. In the end, the government had to withdraw the bill. The quality turned out not to be good enough, I believe that some lessons could be learned from that story.

Land of Desperation

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

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

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

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

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

Property Hierarchies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Property Hierarchies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Conservation a Potential Threat to Local Communities

A threat to conservation? Photo by Pernille/Photografika.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land Policies – do they Matter?

The fuss about land grabbing in Sub-Saharan Africa is understandable. A comparison has shown that the amount of land being transferred is often smaller than reported in the media. Still, the scale of large-scale land acquisitions is breathtaking. Even the liberal magazine the Economist indicates that the time may be up for more regulation. In the article When others are grabbing your land it describes how land deals rarely deliver the benefits they promised.

But whereas activists are right in ringing the alarm bell, the solutions they suggest may not solve the problem. It became clear to me during the conference Africa’s resources – Lions on the move in Copenhagen, earlier this month. There, during his presentation, Lorenzo Cotula, author of the report Land Deals in Africa: What is in the Contracts?, made it clear, that despite the land policy reforms which have been carried out in Sub-Saharan Africa the last couple of decades, the issue of compensation has not been seriously addressed: '…even in those countries where legislation is perceived to be particularly progressive, safeguards within the context of land takings may be weak. And not just because land deals are new – takings have been going on for many years for mining, petroleum, roads, etc.'

Lorenzo Cotula points to a more general problem of loopholes in the legal frameworks in many countries. Therefore, an outright ban on large-scale land transactions, as has been proposed by some activists, is unlikely to solve the problem. It would not address the other types of expropriations which are taking place and it would probably be difficult to enforce.

Policies which ensure compensation in case of expropriation, on the other hand, would be a step forward in protecting people’s rights to land. Ceilings on land purchases and land ownership may also be effective measures. In Brasil, large-scale foreign land acquisitions stalled once such a measure was implemented, according to a recent investment report. I would argue that the ceiling should be for foreign and domestic investors alike. To the locals it does not matter whether land is being bought by a foreign or a domestic investor. The damage they do is the same.

Better land policies may not in themselves solve the problem. As pointed out in a comment to a previous blog post, the question of access to justice and the enforcement of decisions remain crucial. But better land policies would provide a good point of departure.

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, 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.

Change the word ‘native’ with ‘pastoralist’...

It has been noticed by several scholars that when it comes to rights to land, the change from colonial authorities to post-colonial governments in Tanzania may not be so big. Authorities, then and now, have an extreme focus on large-scale farming and on ‘putting land into productive use’. In Thomas Spear’s book Mountain Farmers, about Arusha and Meru farmers on Mount Meru, there is a quote from a Confidential Colonial Government Circular from 1935, which illustrates the point:

While we seek to safeguard native rights, no one, simply by virtue of being a native, has the right to land, which neither her nor the community to which he belongs, has occupied continuously in recent times... Where there is congestion of native population in one area and ample room for expansion in another, there is a moral, though not a legal, obligation resting upon Government to (grant) all such expansion; but it must be strictly controlled, for otherwise Government will lose the power, which is its main duty to maintain, of utilising selected portions of the unoccupied land for the benefit of others whose claims are worthy of consideration on public ground. If, for example, area A is thickly populated by an agricultural community of natives and area B is lightly populated and suitable for the growing of valuable crops, a native A has no more right, legal or moral, than a good settler to occupy the best land... (p. 181).

Try change the word ‘native’ with ‘pastoralist’ and you will get the point. If the government sees that land can be put into more productive use, it will do so. In the colonial times, land was given to settlers. Now it is given to domestic or foreign investors. Existing rights to land may be protected de jure, but in reality they are often not. The approach has lead to considerable alienation of land in rural areas, but, so far, not to many large-scale farming successes.

At the local level this approach has meant that ‘the government’ is, still, often seen as the major threat to tenure security by pastoralists and small-scale farmers.

Agricultural Productivity a Threat to Women’s Land Rights

A threat to productivity?

Recently, I realized that there may be a contradiction between governments’ emphasis on the productive use of land and most people’s secure rights to land in developing countries. In particular women’s access to land is at risk. Again, it was the experiences from the Zimbabwean land reform, which made things clear to me.

It is an established truth that the focus on productivity is a threat to the tenure security of pastoralists. Read Once Intrepid Warriors by Dorothy L. Hodgson and you’ll come across several stories, both from before and after independence, about Tanzanian authorities alienating Maasai land in order to give it to more productive farmers. Ironically, the expected improved productivity did often not materialize. If you read the final version of the Tanzanian governments plan for the implementation of the 1999 land laws, SPILL, from 2005, you will find a similar disregard of pastoralist productivity.

In her book, Gender and Land Reform, Allison Goebel concludes that the same focus on productivity may threaten women’s land rights. In her analysis of the experiences from Zimbabwe’s land reforms she starts off with a very positive story from the early 1980s. Back then, the Zimbabwean government’s land reform policies were still aiming at redistributing land to the landless and thus promoting social justice. Women were also eligible for resettlement land, in particular if they were single women. Over the years, however, the government increasingly shifted its focus. Increasingly, it emphasized that settlers should be able to make productive use of the land. First, training courses were made a prerequisite for being resettled on vacant land. Later, criteria became even stricter and applicants should own a schotchcart (a wooden, wheeled cart) and a plough (p. 24). Obviously, it was much harder for women to meet these requirements. Simultaneously, large tracts of land were given to the new black elite for large-scale farming.

I do understand politicians’ focus on economic growth. It is, after all, the only way for their countries to escape aid-dependency. Still, it triggers me that there is so much talk about productivity and so little debate about how to distribute land and resources. Goebel’s analysis makes it clear that the increased focus on productivity may threaten women’s access to land. Just as it may threaten a lot of other groups’ rights to land.

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 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

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.

Are they Crooks? Reflections on African politicians

Some months ago Chambi Chachage and Swahili Street started a debate on this blog about how to understand the lack of implementation of the Tanzanian land law reform. It started off as comments on one of my blog posts about land investments, but evolved into a debate about conspiracy theories.

The question of how to interpret the lack of implementation of land reforms is not only an issue here on this blog. It is a recurrent theme in much literature about land in Sub-Saharan African countries. A large group of scholars tends to see everything related to land in the light of informality, corruption, and politicians’ illegal practices. I have met quite a few NGO representatives who adhere to the same views. Take a look at this website about land grabbing, and you will find plenty of it.

The reason why I touch upon the issue again is because I have just read the book The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa by Ato Kwamena Onoma who addresses the question directly. He sets out to investigate the truth behind some of these conspiracy theories. He does not decide whether the theories are right or wrong. As a true academic he states that things are more complex. He does make us wiser, though.

In a series of case studies from Botswana, Kenya and Ghana, Onoma investigates the role of politicians in strengthening or undermining land administration institutions in those countries. He does identify incentives for politicians to undermine institutions. Leaders whose power positions are insecure, for instance, often prefer weak institutions because poorly secured property rights allow them to redistribute land and resources to their followers. Thus, they can strengthen their own positions. Conversely, politicians, whose positions rely on a strong business sector which makes productive use of land, for instance through agriculture, tourism or mining, have incentives to strengthen land administration systems which secure businesses’ rights to land.

The most interesting about Onoma’s book, however, is his conclusion. He states that incentives to be corrupt do not automatically lead to corruption. Politicians are not necessarily crooks, even if we can identify incentives which indicate that they could make gains by being crooks. We can only establish whether they are crooks by studying their actions.

Personally I think that non-implementation of land reforms often has more to do with a lack of capacity than with bad intentions. It may merely be bad planning when politicians pass a law without having made any plans for how to implement it. It may be outright stupid when they, like politicians did in Tanzania in 1999-2001, pass an ambitious land reform without a plan for how to implement it. And then, when they make the plan, only allocate 3 billion out of the 300 billion shilling which are required for its implementation. But it does not make them crooks.

Only if they or their followers take advantage of non-implemented laws, for instance by grabbing land which should have been protected by the law but is not, should they be looked upon as crooks.

I am convinced that some politicians are crooks. But I do not think that all politicians are. This conclusion, by the way, is so self-evident that it would not be interesting if it was not for all the conspiracy theories about land and politics in Sub-Saharan Africa.