Land Affairs

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

Traditional Authorities: Do they Deliver Justice in Land Disputes?

The District Land and Housing Tribunal in Tanga.

Policy makers in developing countries face difficult choices when it comes to designing court institutions for settling land disputes. On the one hand, the state court systems are often overburdened with cases. They are often also too expensive to access for most citizens, in particular for women. In other words, to increase the number of courts and reducing the fees may not be a real option in cash-strapped countries with poor populations. Different approaches are required. However, the alternatives may be easier to access, but they often have other unintended consequences.

I was reminded about the dilemma when I read the article Government must consult rural women on the Traditional Court Bill, which criticises the South African government’s decision to vest responsibility over land disputes in customary authorities. A similar critique is raised in the book Land, Power and Custom: Controversies Generated by South Africa's Communal Land Rights Act by Aninka Claassens and Ben Cousins. It describes the customary authorities as being patriarchal and criticizes them for drawing on a repertoire of practices that discriminate against women. Another scholar, Richard Crook, based on his research in Ghana, also warns us against the romanticisation of traditional or customary institutions in his conference paper The state and local justice in Ghana: hybridity, legitimacy and popular values.

In Tanzania, the government in the 1999 Village Land Act and the 2002 Courts (Land Disputes Settlements) Act chose a middle way, prescribing the establishment of village land councils made up, not of professionals, but of appointed laymen and women. The acts also recognized the role of traditional authorities in settling land disputes, but prohibited all gender-discriminatory practices. In theory, these laws and regulations are sound and pragmatic. What the authorities do in practice, however, may be a different matter.

Land Administration: the Colonial Legacy



One of the most exciting books I have read in the last year is The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen. On four hundred pages they analyse the German colonisation of the then German South-West Africa, now Namibia. It is a shocking read. The brutality towards the native population was extreme. The land was the prize the Germans wanted. By then, all the big European countries saw Africa as an empty continent with plenty of Lebensraum for entrepreneurial men and women. And Germany, in particular, was overcrowded, it was thought.

The book convincingly analyses how the technologies of the KZ death camps, the racial state and the war of annihilation - the techniques the Europeans came to know from the German expansion in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, which is seen by the authors as the greatest colonial war in history - had been developed and tested in the colonies in Africa decades earlier.

After the German wars in Namibia in the early 1900s only around sixteen thousand out of eighty thousand Herero remained (p. 230). And only thirteen thousand out of around twenty thousand Nama had survived. At the end, from a total of 57 million hectares of land, 2 million were set aside for the natives.

The book about the German genocide in Namibia made me think of Tanzania, which is the country I do most of my research in, in a different way. Until then, naively, I had bought into the story of Tanzania as a largely peaceful country with a largely peaceful history. I do not know where that tale comes from, but it is not true. It never was. Maybe the violence was less ruthless in Tanzania compared to Namibia and the settler colonies Kenya and Zimbabwe, but it was violence none the less.

One of the books about Tanzania’s history I have read subsequently is To Devour the Land of Mkwawa: Colonial Violence and the German-Hehe War in East Africa 1884-1914 by David Pizzo. It explores the German encounters with the strongest political entity in East Africa in the 1890s; the Uhehe. The encounters ended up in a total war. Again, the civilians paid the prize. In their attempts to cut off the support and supplies the population could provide the Hehe Chief, the Germans encamped the civilian population and followed a scorched earth tactics in which everything – villages and crops - was destroyed. The area around the Hehe capital, Kalenga, having been depopulated during the war, became a centre for European settlers. Today, it is known as the Iringa Highlands.

And so a number of rebellions shaped land ownership in Tanzania. In 1888 there was the ‘Arab Revolt’ along the coast. In 1890 the Maasai revolted. In 1905, the Maji Maji Revolt broke out in Southern Tanzania, when the tribes formerly allied with the colonial authorities, rebelled. This time the Wahehe were on the German side. 2-300,000 were killed. The First World War was no less devastating, according to another scholar, Jan-Bart Gewald in his working paper Colonial Warfare: Hehe and World War One, the Wars besides Maji Maji in South-Western Tanzania.

There has been a tendency to describe many of these atrocities as German phenomena. According to David Pizzo, however, that would be a mistake. His argues that the violence is part of colonialism as a system of exploitation. The famous Polish-British author Joseph Conrad were of a similar opinion. Though his Heart of Darkness has been read as a description of the Belgians’ genocidal behaviour in Congo, he describes the Belgian Colonel Kurtz like a European character, not a Belgian one: His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz... (p. 135).

The point is that land and violence in the colonies were narrowly intertwined. You can not understand these countries today without knowing that history. Personally, I keep wondering whether there is some kind of connection between Operation Vijiji – Tanzania’s forced villagisation programme in the 1970s – and these colonial precedents. And I keep wondering how long it will take before the mindset – that people can be moved around at will – disappears.

Decoupled Land Reform Implementation in Tanzania

This week I published an article in the Journal of Development Studies. It analyses the slow and eneven implementation of Tanzania’s of new-wave land reform today, more than ten years after its introduction in 1999. I argue that implementation is characterised by decoupling, involving a lack of coherence and of mechanisms of enforcement. It can be observed at all levels within the land administration structure. If Tanzania is to implement the reform on a larger scale, the country has to put greater emphasis on national initiatives to couple administrative layers. More money alone will not solve the problem.

Because of their novelty, our knowledge about current new-wave land reforms in sub-Saharan Africa has hitherto been limited. In the early 2000s land reforms were underway in more than 20 countries. Decentralisation of responsibility for land management has been an important intention in most reforms. How that spelled out in practice, however, remained unclear. Through implementation analyses conducted in rural areas in mainland Tanzania, the article analyses how a new-wave land reform is being implemented at the local level.

Read the article: Decoupled Implementation of New-Wave Land Reforms: Decentralisation and Local Governance of Land in Tanzania. In
Journal of Development Studies, Volume 48, Issue 2, 2012.



Land Law Reforms as Cover-Ups for Land Grabbing? (2) Reflexions on Tanzania

Were the new wave land reforms introduced only to enable the elites in sub-Saharan African countries to legalise the grabbing of land? Based on my impressions from Uganda, I discussed the question in a previous blog post. I concluded that it could be the case. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why so little effort is put into making the new land administration services, prescribed by the law, available to the majority of the population.

In Tanzania, which I know better because this is where I did most of my field research, the situation is, in some ways, less clear. The issue of land grabbing is not really part of my PhD project (which is more about land administration). However, since a titling project had been carried out in one of the districts I have studied, I could not avoid digging into it. I have focused on the choice of pilot implementation districts. Here comes my reflexions.

Four larger pilot projects have been carried out in Tanzania. I have described some of the initial experiences in the Working Paper Tanzania’s Land Law Reform: The Implementation Challenge. I do not all of them in detail and I do not know a lot about all of the districts in which they were implemented. However, there seems to be a pattern in the choice of pilot districts. There seems to have been pre-existing commercial interests in the land in the chosen districts.

The first major project was carried out in Mbozi District by the Ministry of Lands. The official explanation that I have come across for the choice of Mbozi as a pilot project district is the district’s ‘commercial farming potential’. In Mbozi District, according to the report The State of the Then NAFCO, NARCO and Absentee Landlords’ Farms/Ranches in Tanzania by Chambi Chachage, there is a large, formerly state-owned, maize farm in the waiting to be privatised. There are also a number of coffee farms owned by the Mbozi District Council. Furthermore, according to Andrew Kiondo, in the book Agrarian Economy, State and Society in Contemporary Tanzania from 1999, there were reports of illegal land sales in that area in the 1980s (p. 48).Mzeri Village. The ranch is in the hills behind the village.

The second pilot was MKURABITA’s project in Handeni District It is a project I have researched quite a bit. The official explanation for the choice of Handeni District, according to Kosyando’s report Mkurabita and the Implementation of the Village land Law was that the district, due to a previous land use planning and forestry project funded by a German aid agency, had the equipment and knowhow to implement a pilot project.

I thought of a less noble explanation when I was there. The huge Mzeri cattle ranch (41,246 hectares) was being privatised - or subleased according to Chachage’s report - in the period. The then Prime Minister Lowassa (who was later fired because of corruption) got a big chunk of land there. So did the local MP. Accidentally, one of the pilot villages is situated right next to the ranch (see the map: the green area indicates the ranch, the blue area indicates the village) and people were evicted during the survey, when they were found to be living on land that had been allocated to the farm in the 1970s. When I asked, nobody in Handeni would confirm that the pilot had to do with the privatisation of the farm. Still, I found the correlation between pilot project implementation and privatisation remarkable.

The third pilot was carried out in Bagamoyo District. With its proximity to Dar es Salaam it is a much more urban setting and there is a pressure on the land because of the expansion of the city, but also because ‘it is an easy target for land based investments, such as biofuels’ (Kosyando’s Bagamoyo report p. 5). Apparently, there is no relationship between the pilot project and land privatisation. But again, there is a remarkable correlation in time between the MKURABITA project, carried out from September 2007 to February 2008 and a large Biofuels project in the district starting from January 2008. The biofuel project, thoroughly described in Kjell Havnevik’s chapter in the book Biofuels, Land Grabbing and Food Security in Africa and Chachage’s report Acquisition and Accumulation in Tanzania, had a Swedish investor and was to be carried out on 22,000 hectares of a large, idle, cattle ranch belonging to the Government of Zanzibar.  Havnevik describes how there was a ‘great confusion’ over what the project area entailed and that pastoralists and neighboring villagers used the land. Chachage also describes a number of smaller state farms in Bagamoyo which were to be privatized in the period from 2005 onwards.

The fourth – and by far the biggest – pilot project has been carried out in Babati and Bariadi Districts by the Ministry of Lands. I do not know much about these two districts. But again, there is a correlation between project and the privation of a farm, although it is not as clear as in Bagamoyo. The pilot was carried out from 2008 to 2010, whereas the Setchet Farm was privatized in 2005. I have also noticed the recent newspaper reports on tensions over the land. According to the Citizen’s article Envoy’s Fear on Babati Clashes 30 January, much of the land had allocated to settlers during colonial times, but was left idle, sold or taken over by the state after independence. Is this the land now being resurveyed as part of the pilot project and is that giving rise to the clashes in the area? I do not know. But the commercial interests in the land seem be the same in Babati as in the other pilot districts.

My conclusion on this? My conclusion, so far, is that the 1999 land law reform may result in Tanzania’s elite legalizing the land they have grabbed, but it is not the only purpose of it. There are other elements of the reform, for instance the land court system, which has greatly helped a lot of people in the country. The land use planning requirements also have some potential. And most of the pilot project outputs actually benefitted non-elites. The people I talked to who had received a customary title deed – a CCRO – were happy about having it.

Still, when it comes to the choice of pilot implementation districts, there is a remarkable correlation between the choice of pilot project sites and commercial interests in land, in particular linked to the privatisation of former state farms and ranches. A similar focus on the sale of former state farms to investors, by the way, can be found in the Tanzanian government’s prestigious SAGCOT agricultural growth corridor. Is it land grabbing? I am not sure. Some would argue that the transactions are illegitimate and that the land, when not used by the state, should be returned to the communities it was taken from. From their point of view it is land grabbing. From a strictly legal point of view, however, I guess there is nothing wrong with the re-surveying old boundaries and the selling of the land. What do you think?

Encouraging Land Reform News from Rwanda

Sub-Saharan African countries have introduced a ‘new wave’ of land reforms in the last couple of decades (read about the reforms in this review). Unlike previous, more state-centric reforms, these new reforms decentralise responsibility for the administration of land to the local level and streamline disparate land law regimes. For instance, customary tenure and fully individualised freehold tenure may get converged into a single, more formal tenure system. Typically, reforms also aim at protecting the land rights of women and vulnerable groups.

So far, evidence has been scarce and land reform debates have largely been based on findings from past reforms. Slowly, however, results start appearing. And they are more positive than what many scholars expected. Recently, I received a Working Paper, Environmental and Gender Impacts of Land Tenure Regularisation in Africa, which presents evidence from pilot implementation projects in Rwanda, which is to carry out a nation-wide land tenure regularisation program. Its outcomes were positive, though I do not think they herald a revolution.

The paper concludes that Legally married women were significantly more likely to have their informal ownership rights documented and secured after registration. But women who were not legally married saw diminished property rights, in accordance with the law (p. 14). It is important that the pilot project has improved most women’s access to land. Titling programmes effect on gender equality was an important criticism in the past. Old-fashioned land reforms typically registered land in the name of the household head – the husband – and reduced women’s control over land (read, for instance, this working paper p. 19).

A joint title or seperate property?

The Rwandan findings are largely in line with my findings from implementation projects in Tanzania. But based on my research I would also emphasise that there are significant differences within the groups of married and unmarried women. Single women, I would say, may even be in better off than married women if they get registered as household heads. Women who get single due to divorce, on the other hand, may be worse off. Reform, in other words, polarises women’s positions.

Bottom-line is that new wave land reforms seem to improve most women’s access to land. It does not happen automatically, however. The authors of the working paper warn that ‘careful design based on local conditions, and continued monitoring during implementation’ are required. It is also my impression that the approach of implementers – whether they emphasise women’s rights to land during training sessions and implementation – is important.

Despite these significant findings, the working paper has a serious methodological weakness. It seems to me that the conclusion is based on changes in perceptions only. In other words, the researchers have been looking at whether more women are ‘entitled’ to equal ownership rights (p. 13). It does not tell us whether their actual ability to defend their rights if they have to, for instance in case of divorce. If you have more information about the Rwandan land reform and whether it has actually improved women’s tenure security it is most welcome.

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.

Agriculture, Inequality and Economic Growth

The market place coming to a town near you.

I am not an economist. Still, I find the discussions about economic growth in Africa interesting, not least because my field of study, land, is rife with theories about how land can and can not contribute to economic growth.

A very dominant theory among decision makers in Tanzania is the one about large-scale farming, which they see as a shortcut to economic growth. I am not able to tell if they are right or not. But I am quite sure that they should start focusing on Tanzania’s small-scale farmers, if they also aim at distributing the benefits of growth equally.

I write this, because I have just read a book published by the World Bank, Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent. It analyses the policies behind a number of development successes in Africa. Tanzania is such a success case because of macroeconomic stability. Tanzania’s economy has grown 6% on average since 1996. That is a number that would make most politicians in the rich world jealous. But Tanzania’s growth is not reducing poverty significantly.

The poverty rate in Tanzania was 38.6% in 1991, 35.6% in 2001 and 33.4% in 2007 according to this Twaweza publication. That is a very poor performance. It is hard to understand why the development has been that slow. But then, in the World Bank book one can read that Tanzania’s growth is driven mainly by services and industry. Agriculture did not contribute to growth. That is a problem, according to the authors, since most people in the country depend on agriculture: The limited contribution of agriculture - in a country whereabout three-quarters of the population resides in rural areas, where poverty is concentrated - is a concern (pp. 26-27). In other words, unless the Tanzanian politicians start focusing on improving the conditions of small-scale farmers, they are unlikely to reduce poverty levels significantly.

The book describes a couple of success cases where agriculture has contributed to economic growth. Malawi is one and Kenya the other. Their stories are quite different.

In 2005 the Malawian government, in response to severe food security difficulties, launched an input subsidy program. It provided vouchers for maize fertilizers to more than half of Malawi’s farm households and also distributed improved maize seeds and tobacco fertilizers. Subsequently, maize production is estimated to have increased by 26–60 percent, while food availability has improved and wages in the agricultural sector have increased.

The Kenyan story goes like this: around 1990, the Kenyan government liberalised the fertiliser market and donations by donors were phased out. The use of fertiliser, subsequently, doubled between 1992 and 2007. Much of the increased use was among smallholder farmers. Largely as a result of the increase in fertilizer usage, maize yields in Kenya increased 18 percent over 1997–2007.

Obviously, it must have been cheaper for the Kenyan government than for the Malawian to achieve the increase in production. That is part of the reason why the book’s authors like the Kenyan story better. Another reason is the more market-based Kenyan intervention (it is, after all, a World Bank publication).
What I find interesting about the Kenyan story is that fertiliser became much more accessible for most farmers after liberalisation. In some regions the average distance from the farm to the fertiliser seller was reduced from 15 kilometres in 1997 to around 4 kilometres in 2007. To me, the examples point to the importance of improving ordinary, small-scale farmers’ access: access to improved seeds, access to fertiliser, access to markets, etc.

It is possible, in other words, to improve agricultural growth without a narrow focus on large-scale agriculture. The measures described here are small, practical improvements, not the grand schemes, the distribution of tractors, and the focus on large-scale farming that Tanzanian decision makers tend to prefer (read a previous blog post about it here).

Small vs. Large-Scale Farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. A Verdict

Sufficiently efficient?

An implicit, but usually unstated, assumption of the current critique of new wave of land grabbing in Sub-Saharan is that small scale farming is socially more just and economically more efficient than large-scale farming. Subsequently even legal large scale land transactions are denounced as illegitimate land grabbing.

Large-scale farming, on the other hand, is preferred by many colonial and post-colonial governments alike, eager to attract investments. They believe that large-scale farming, often under the banner of ‘scientific agriculture’, is the only real shortcut to improving agriculture in their countries (see for instance  James Scott’s Seeing like State about the failures of the Ujamaa reforms and large-scale farming in Tanzania).

I have just read the Working Paper Experiences of Plantation and Large-Scale Farming in 20th Century Africa, which seeks to pass a verdict in the heated debate. Through a careful review of existing literature on large-scale farming and plantation farming from the first economic theories in the late 18th century up to scientific studies of the present the author, Peter Gibbon, concludes that both positions may be right. Previously, in the last half of the 20th century, scholars regarded small scale farmers as superior. That may be true any more, he writes, because of a combination of policy interventions and market developments:

The albeit unevenly rising productivity of LSF food and tobacco production in the settler economies from ca. 1960…relates to public interventions in the areas of credit, input supply and especially research and extension. These investments were racially skewed and costly – which in turn limited their lifespan. The high productivity characterizing LSF (Large-scale farming, ed.) production of higher value crops from the 1980s onward, in contrast, seems to have related to the advent of a new generation of investors and the establishment of new, relatively short global value chains linked to dynamic changes in demand in retail markets.

The lesson, in other words, is that adept policy makers can increase the productivity of large-scale farming. Policy makers can also influence the creation of jobs and the quality of jobs:
In short, productivity, employment generation and employment quality can all be subjected
to modification by policy – policies to support capital intensification, policies to promote farming of more labour intensive crops and policies of labour protection.

Peter Gibbon thus identifies ways to increase the benefits from large-scale farming. But he has not analysed whether similar interventions could enhance the productivity and wellbeing of small-scale farmers, who make up the majority of people in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is a shame. More attention should be devoted to supporting the activities of small-scale farmers. Not because they are more efficient, but because it will contribute to a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Brief on Tanzania’s Land Reform out now

I have published the Policy Brief The Forgotten Villages. Land Reform in Tanzania. Click here to download it free of charge.

Tanzania's 1999 land reform has decentralised land administration to the rural local village governments, but implementation so far has been slow and uneven. The local authorities rarely get the support they need to make it work. As a consequence, the benefits promised by the reform - economic growth and improved tenure security - do not happen.

There has already been an abundance of donor driven projects to implement the reform, but they have been short-sighted and have tended to forget the local authorities that carry out the actual implementation. Much could be achieved if higher level authorities and NGOs systematically strengthened the village authorities and enabled them to deliver their services. This would be a long-term process and more money alone would not solve the problem. But as long as this level of administration is forgotten, the land reform will not work in practice.

Corruption or Trust. Land Administrations in East Africa

How about a little survey?

I am currently in Uganda, working on a report about land. I have met quite a few people working within the land sector here - public officials, scholars and donors alike - who complain about people’s ignorance and lack of trust in the government and in public authorities. The lack of trust, they say, is the reason why people at the local level often shun land surveyors and fight titling, which they see as a government scheme to take land. These people, so the argument goes, fight ‘development’. Interestingly, I have encountered the same complaints from land officials in Tanzania.

Now, today, I read an article in the Ugandan Daily Monitor, that the Ugandan Ministry of Lands is perceived as one of the most corrupt institutions in East Africa. The funny thing is that the same goes for the land institutions in Tanzania. Every year, when Transparency International publishes its corruption index for Tanzania, the land administration institutions top the list as some of the most corrupt.

That makes me wonder whether ‘lack of trust’ is the right way to phrase the problem. I tend to see the people’s behaviour, when they shun land officials and land projects, as perfectly rational. The real problem, then, is corruption. Corruption, after all, undermines trust.

Good news from the Tanzanian Government?

It is not often that I praise the Tanzanian government. But good news appeared from there recently. Maybe. At a conference for land stakeholders the Minister of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development, Mrs. Tibaijuka, decried the bitter conflicts between villagers and investors. Her comments were, I believe, aimed at the land grabbing debate. In order to end these conflicts, she said, according to an article in the Citizen, the Ministry of Lands had made rules to ensure that no land is allocated and no deals are made unless local representatives are made part of the process and play a part in signing the documents. If that means that the village authorities are guaranteed a role and final say in land deals, this is good news!

In a previous blog post I have written about the lack of sustainability which characterises deals made without proper involvement of the village authorities. I have also written about the amendments of the Village Land Act, currently underway, which are rumoured to aim at facilitating land deals by bypassing the villages authorities. If Mrs. Tibaijuka’s announcement means that the village authorities’ role in land deals will be strengthened, it is a new signal and a very positive one. But maybe that was not what Mrs. Tibaijuka meant. According to the article in the Citizen she said that local representatives should be made aware and play a part in the deals and then she continued: Councillors and MPs should attend all the meetings in which plans to offer land to an investor are discussed. They should comply with the plans before any deal is signed. But are district councillors and MPs ‘local representatives’ when it comes to land deals? I am not so sure.

What made the Village Land Act so significant, when it was passed in 1999, was the decentralisation of power over land to the village level authorities, that is, to the people living on the land. By then, Tanzania had witnessed several incidents of land grabbing where corrupt district leaders and district land officers had sold village land without consulting the communities. Some of these shady deals were documented in the reports by the Land Commission, headed by Professor Shivji. If the new system referred to by Mrs. Tibaijuka means that the village authorities will, now again, be bypassed when land deals are made, it is not a step forward. It is the opposite.

...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.

No Promised Land. Tanzanian Land Use and Urban Planning Failure

Travelling through Tanzania these days is like doing a pilgrimage in Egypt at the time of the ten plagues. On doors and walls all over the country you find red marks, similar to the ones their god ordered the Israelites to make on doorposts, using lamb’s blood, to make sure that their houses would be bypassed untouched when the tenth and most cruel plague was initiated: the killing of all firstborn children in Egypt.

In present-day Tanzania, however, the marks signify demolition, not salvation. Demolition of houses and property of almost biblical proportions. The man behind the operation is the ever effective Minister for Works John Magufuli. The Minister has, correctly, observed that the lack of compliance with laws and regulations has led to anarchy along Tanzania’s thousands of kilometres of roads. According to the article Magufuli’s warning to road encroachers in the Citizen he points out that it has become very difficult to expand the roads because of the houses which have been built on road reserves.

In Dar es Salaam the congestion has become critical and the city struggles to cope with the increase in the number of cars. Magufuli wants to draw a line in the sand and demolish all the buildings which have been constructed too close to the road. In a speech in parliament he challenged those who did not agree:
‘If members of Parliament feel it is not right, let us agree that Tanzanian roads should measure only 30 centimetres’.

The problem with settlements which do not follow rules and regulations goes a long way back. Therefore, when travelling through Tanzania’s countryside, you will find even decade-old housed marked for demolition. In those villages where houses are dotted along a main road, the majority of houses are likely to disappear if the order is carried out.

One can choose to applaud Magufuli’s effort to improve public order as does the Citizen in its editorial Time to crack the whip last week. The irregularities have to stop, better today than tomorrow.

Still, I find the dictum a bit too simplistic. The irregularities are not merely caused by people’s desire to circumvent laws and regulations. They are also caused by underfinanced and malfunctioning land management authorities and inaccessible land use planning services, as pointed out by professor Kombe from the ARDHI University in Dar es Salaam in several books and articles (read for instance his paper about the last decades’ development within the sector in Informal Land Management in Tanzania and the Misconception about its Illegality). If everybody had waited for advice and services from these authorities, Dar es Salaam would still be a village today.

It is therefore not fair to put all the blame for the irregularities on ‘encroachers’. The dysfunctional public authorities are also responsible. The red marks, thus, are not only symbols of irregularities which are to be corrected. They are also symbols of the failures of Tanzania’s land authorities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The spirit of Nyerere?

Nyere Park, Dodoma, Tanzania.

I just got home to Dar es Salaam after a couple of days in Dodoma, the political capital of Tanzania. There, I did the mandatory city cruise. In Mwalimu J.K. Nyerere Park I was fascinated by the contradictory symbols, depicted in the photo, which are so typical for Tanzania. To the left, a statue of Nyerere, the president of Tanzania for more than two decades after the independence, and the inventor of African socialism. In the middle, a business college, which, I assume, must have been established after Nyerere retired in 1985. And finally, to the right, there is a billboard advertising the services of one of the main telecommunication companies in Tanzania, using a photo of the very same Nyerere as an eye-catcher.

Today, more than ten years after his death in 1999, Nyerere is still a major figurehead in the country. Even those, whose land and property were nationalised and those whose huts were demolished and burned during the Ujamaa heydays of his reign, see him as the father of the nation. It would, therefore, be an exaggeration to accuse the telecommunication company of violating any intellectual property rights. Nyerere belongs to everybody. In a sense, he has been nationalised too. Still, I can not help wondering whether the use of his photo for such commercial purposes is in the spirit of Nyerere?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Demand-driven or Donor-driven Land Reform?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Are Tanzanian Farmers Stupid?

A Tanzanian farmer on his power tiller.

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

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

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

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

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

Tanzania’s Land Law Reform - Slow and uneven Progress

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

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

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.