The need for a new land administration structure for rural Zambia

By E.Tembo
Zambia is a vast country with huge chunks of bare land. However we hear the continuous refrain of shortage of land. Everyone who has found new wealth will be looking for a piece of land whether serviced or not. The flaw in our system is to let land “manage itself” and yet land is a very important resource. The poor manner in which we manage land in the rural areas has led everyone to flee the village and come to the city. The old song called “Mayendele” rings in my head. “Kale bamwisa baletwikata ubulofwa, nomba iyo, mayendele muno Zambia”. While this is good it has brought about serious strain in terms of providing services in the cities and towns. And unless we tackle the rural areas we shall continue to gratify an ever increasing urban population who will continue to demand more from our cities and towns. We therefore need to manage our rural land better.

Land management covers all activities, concerned with the management of land as a resource such as agriculture, mining, property and estate management and the physical planning of towns and the villages both from an environmental and economic perspective. Unfortunately we seem to take management of land rather casually in Zambia as in most African countries as witnessed by the general abject squalor that the lot of our people live in.

The dungeons in Chibolya, the smell of sewer in Garden, the massive heaps of uncollected garbage in Misisi is testimony of allowing land to manage itself. Our major cities and towns are all but glorified shanties with basic amenities such as clean piped water being a reserve for a few. In the countryside we are saying depletion of forest reserves for energy purposes, while we sit in our air-conditioned offices saying all nice things about how we are managing climate change. Clearly we are not doing something right.

Underlying most of these problems is the way we administer land. I wish to interrogate the land question from the functional aspect of land administration in the country and what I believe we need to do as a country if we are to truly engender sustainable development.

One land economist once said, “the trouble with land is that they do not make it anymore”. Indeed supply of land is fixed while demand will continue to soar. However, when we look at our land mass versus our population we should not be in the situation where land is in short supply at all.

Our colleagues in Japan must be wondering what is wrong with us crowding in a small land mass called Lusaka when we have such a vast land. It is not land per se that we should be looking at providing but rather shelter and amenities. Added to the supply quagmire is the fact that we are not opening serviced land and are allowing ourselves to create eyesores of townships with individuals creating their own services. It is not uncommon to find acres of land allocated with no services of basic roads, water and sewerage.

A casual glance at Lusaka will reveal that the whole of Lusaka South and North has all but been “consumed” by massive self built housing with hardly any aid from the state in the form of basic services of any kind. In fact we should commend our people for the tenacious way in which they are able to create housing on their own initiative and create some kind of services to access their houses and find water to drink, throw rubbish –all without the aid of the government.

Critically, though we need to be forward looking and assess the demand for land by initially carrying out a land audit around our major towns and cities. We can only develop that which we know and therefore the starting point should be to analyse who owns what land around the cities and what use it is for. It can be argued that this information is available at the Ministry of Lands.

But to what extent have we mapped and recorded all the land transactions in the peripheral of our cities and towns? Pieces of land falling in the ambit of the chiefs around the major towns and cities are not well recorded. Therefore huge chunks of land (so-called farms) are being apportioned with the consent of the traditional leaders. We now have the new smart Alecs from the city owning land on the peripheral of the cities and towns who call themselves “farmers”. Traditional land is very susceptible to abusive use and with collusion of traditional leaders is subjected to all forms of subdivision and sold to the highest bidder without recourse to any planning ethics. Consent by the chief for instance is not commensurate to judicious use of the land by the one who gets consent; neither does it suggest that the consent is beneficial to the community or the land itself. The expectation is that the land delivery system should at the very minimum involve planning, surveying, servicing, pricing, allocation and title registration. One, of course, can argue that this is only applicable to urban land. Indeed this land delivery cycle is best suited to state land. However, customary land also requires some form of land delivery system which will create real value to the land.

There is need therefore to build new structures to manage traditional land. The current laissez-faire attitude of handling land in traditional /customary areas will impact negatively for the future. We must understand that traditional leadership, with due respect, does not have the requisite skills to manage and administer land as required in a modern economy.

A policy decision needs to be made to introduce a new governance structure in the rural areas; this structure can include the traditional leadership but must in the main be made up of technocrats whose job it is to oversee the proper administration of land. Perhaps the Ministry of Chiefs will come up with a policy on rural development which will come up with a land administrative structure which tackles land administration in the rural areas. The model in countries like Botswana and Namibia can be used to develop such a structure. Botswana has created Land Boards in each province.

These Boards elected and selected by the Minister of Lands are composed of the salaried “civil servants” who are schooled in land administration. The chief executive of a land board is a board secretary who would be equivalent to a director in a government department. Each district will also have sub-land-boards to govern land at the district.

So, by the same token there is need as a sense of urgency to come up with new land administration structures in the rural areas of Zambia. I think the office of the district commissioner could well be converted to that of the land manager in areas where the councils are not planning authorities. This will of course necessitate the creation of land records in each district which would then feed into the national land database. The current situation where anyone who wants to get a title deed must travel to Mulungushi House is untenable for the future; if any thing the situation lends itself to corrupt practice. In this regard it is gratifying to note that the new government is keen to see a new decentralised government system. How this will pan out will be significant in heralding a new development paradigm in the rural areas of Zambia.