Messing with the role of land in socio-economic development

Dar es Salaam. On September 12, this year, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa reprimanded officials of the Lands Department and local government authorities for delaying investment overtures, saying that such officials did not have the country’s best interests in mind and at heart.

Mr Majaliwa was responding to a parliamentary question by a Special Seats MP (CCM), Ms Jacqueline Msongizi, who wanted the government’s explanation about some land officials who, in her views, “derail projects [by prospective investors] by creating unnecessary bureaucracies.

“It’s very unfortunate that discouraging potential investors is still done in government departments and local councils when we are doing everything possible to attract [investments],” responded the Premier as it was reported in the media at the time.

Mr Majaliwa vowed that “we will take serious measures against such people. The government is working hard to create a conducive environment [for investors] by listening to their complaints.”

It was, however, not quite clear exactly how the derailment was taking place – or even what forms it takes. But, for many land activists who are hell-bent on preventing expropriation of land from simple villagers in the name of ‘private investment,’ this was nothing but a manifestation of how common the marketisation of land has become!

“If Mwalimu Nyerere were to miraculously arise from the dead today, he would be absolutely baffled by the pace of ‘land marketization’ in this country,” said Mr Bernard Baha, a national coordinator with the Tanzania Land Alliance (Tala). Tala is a member-based organisation representing the leading land rights organisations in Tanzania.

“That’s what his (Mwalimu’s) reaction would be – because what is happening now in the country is exactly what he had spent his entire life warning against.”

Land not an item for sale

And, Mr Baha is right. Mwalimu – whose 20th death anniversary is on October 14 this year – rejected the idea that land could, should, be treated as a marketable commodity. That is: land should not, must not, be transformed into an item for sale in the market.

Nyerere was also against the view that national land should be a private property.

A political theorist and gifted writer, Mwalimu wrote in 1974, that: ‘If people are given land to use as their property, then they have the right to sell it. It will not be difficult to predict who, in fifty years’ time, will be the landlords and who the tenants.

“In a country such as this where, generally speaking, the Africans are poor and the foreigners are rich, it is quite possible that, within eighty or a hundred years, if the poor Africans were allowed to sell their land, all the land in (Tanzania) would belong to wealthy immigrants – and the indigenous people would be tenants.

“But, even if there were no rich foreigners in this country, there would emerge rich and clever [Tanzanians]. If we allow land to be sold like robes, within a short period there would only be a few Africans possessing land – and all the others would be tenants! “

The result, Mwalimu warned then, would be the emergence of “a small group of landlords and a large group of tenants” – and this would consequently create “antagonism among peoples.”

According to a land activist, Ms Marcelina Kibena, the “antagonism” might take various forms. One is that involving cultivators and pastoralists – which, she says, dominate the debate on land issues, leaving the elephant in the room untouched.

“The main source of these conflicts – massive land marketisation for private investment – is rarely seen as a problem and, thus, remains unaddressed,” notes the deputy chairperson of the Morogoro Regional Smallholder Farmers Network in a recently-published book.

Writing at the tenth anniversary of Mwalimu’s death in 2009, Dr Ng’wanza Kamata – a political science lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam – noted that the indisputability of Mwalimu’s opposition to the privatisation or of letting loose private interests on land was obvious.

“Ten years after Mwalimu’s death (in 1999), land disputes and cases of displacement of masses of people are common in Tanzania,” Kamata wrote then in an analysis published on the Pambazuka blog. “This is a logical consequence of liberalism.”

Many land activists think that this was as relevant then as it is today.

Although he acknowledges that, even during Mwalimu’s leadership, there were cases of mass displacements of people from their land, Dr Kamata notes that there is nevertheless a difference.

“Under Ujamaa, [land] was acquired for what was regarded as ‘state farms’; today, it is ‘grabbed’ for private interests, particularly for or by a group known as ‘Wawekezaji’ (investors),” he wrote.

Mwalimu’s ‘mistake’

Much as he admires Mwalimu Nyerere for his opposition to privatisation of land, Dr Kamata, nonetheless, thinks that Mwalimu was wrong to think that placing land under the state would keep it under firm control of the people. He pointed out that allowing the President to be the custodian of land has its roots in the colonial past whose 1923 Land Ordinance Nyerere embraced unchanged.

“On this, Mwalimu was wrong, as government bureaucrats replaced the people – and the laws, such as the Land Acquisition Act of 1967, allowed it. This way they were, and are still, able to evict people from their lands,” wrote Kamata.

Ms Kibena concurs, saying that, as long as land continues to be controlled by the state (and its bureaucracy) the majority would be robbed of their lands. She and other land activists want the land, which belongs to the people, to be vested in the people. As it is, the people who depend on land live in village communities, and the body which represents them all is the Village Assembly. So, legally, village land should be vested in this organ.

Mr Baha dismisses the idea as false that the privatisation of land leads to efficiency and its effective utilisation – and, thus, national development. He says most privatised land has in the past ended up being idle in the midst of high demand for land for both crops farming and pastoralisation.

In the event, he suggests that an assessment be done of the factors that led to the failure of Cooperatives Movement, and a strategy be devised to revive it.

He notes: “Smallholder farmers and producers comprise a majority in this country, and cooperatives offer a basic mechanism for meaningfully utilising them in national development.”