Mwanza. If there is any contentious agenda on which Tanzania do not see eye to eye with the rest of East African Community (EAC) partner states, it is land.Land was one of the apples of discord when Tanzania hesitated to endorse a Report on the 24th Meeting of the EAC Council of Ministers during the November regional meeting held in Bujumbura, Burundi.

Tanzania maintained that the Bujumbura final report of the council had drawback clauses that compromised with sensitive items against the country’s national interests.

East African Cooperation deputy minister Abdallah Sadala defended the move, insisting that land was exhaustively dealt with in the regional Common Market Protocol. But to whose benefits is Tanzanian excluding land from the regional integration if not its citizens, including peasants and pastoralists, who have been deprived of the natural resource even before independence? How genuine is the protection of land under the current land policy and laws if the Bunjumbura development was not the biggest upset of the country’s foreign policy in 2011?

The rejection of what was supposed to be a step towards strengthening the regional integration had obviously disappointed other EAC member countries, as some threatened to move ahead without Tanzania. The wrath of the EAC member countries apparently was reflected in the sulking heads of state abscond the 50th anniversary of the Tanganyika independence the following month.

The Tanzania Government has since independence maintained more or less the same colonial land policy and practices with some slight reforms made in 1995. The land has since been vested in the President as was the case with the British colonial Governor, which held the radical title.

Fundamental principles of the 1995 reformed National Land Policy were incorporated in the Land Act No.4 and Village Land Act No.5, which were enacted in 1999 before they came into force in May, 2001. The government’s move to bar land in the regional integration may seem as a brave gesture towards protecting the precious natural resource, but millions of peasants and pastoralists have not had access to it.

Tanzania has a surface area of 94.3 million hectares with almost a quarter of it allocated to reserves and five per cent only is cultivated annually. Most of the about 10 million hectares of the uncultivated land is for pasture.

One of the key areas of concern, however, has been the absence of adequate and coordinated land information fuelling land use conflicts between farmers and livestock keepers currently spreading to almost every region. Shilinde Ngalula, a lawyer with the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC), who led a team of experts in Serengeti district recently, accuses local authorities of escalating land conflicts.

The local authorities stipulated in the 1999 Village Land Act have now become a setback instead of a remedy, he observes. Besides widespread corruption allegations levelled against the local authorities, the majority of district council members are ignorant of the land laws.

Persistent land disputes extend to urban, as the demands for towns to grow increasingly encroach on the surrounding farming areas, triggering conflicts between customary and granted land rights. About 70 per cent of urban population resides in unplanned settlements as a result of local authorities facing an acute shortage of professionals ranging from land surveyors to valuers, land officers and town planners, among others.

Foreigners from East Africa and beyond have been taking advantage of the malfunctioning of the laws and the local authorities’ incompetency to acquire land at ease in the name of investors. The national policy facilitates prospective investors to acquire land in tandem with liberalisation of the economy, which calls for the promotion of foreign direct investments.

Olengurumwa (2001) and other scholars have for ages been calling for the repeal of the flawed land laws, but their outcry lands on deaf ears of the government bureaucracy. Despite its high growth rate, Tanzania boasts having surplus land compared to other EAC member states such as Burundi whose arable land can no longer sustain its ever growing population.

 Land rights are threatening to undermine the progress made by Burundi towards achieving a long-term peace, causing fear of renewed conflict.

It is logically assumed against this background that Burundi citizens are eying Tanzania’s idle arable land to meet their growing demands for the natural resource.

The same applies with citizens of all other EAC partner states. Closely looking at Kenya’s 2007 post-election violence and Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, among others, one can, in one way or another, attribute root courses of all the conflicts to citizens’ misgivings shrouded in land. As refugees displaced by the conflicts increasingly return to their homes of origin, pressure on land resources is mounting at unbearable levels in the entire region. 

And this is what makes both politicians and ordinary citizens alike worried in Tanzania over the impact of incorporating their land in the EAC integration on land conflicts arising from the local botched laws and incompetence. They fear aggressive small and large-scale farmers from the rest of the region would grab their valuable resource. But is the Tanzania’s EAC minister’s short-lived attempt to protect their country’s land at regional level without plugging loopholes in the 1999 land Acts not futile?

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