Land conflicts: Issues run deeper than commissions - Tanzania | Land Portal

We learn from Dodoma that the Law Reform Commission of Tanzania has recast the way we deal with conflicts over access to land and its associated resources.

The Commission’s latest report presented to the Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Dr Asha-Rose Migiro, faults the old system of addressing land disputes, saying it has since proved rather unwieldy. The old system, we are told, was tardy because it was concentrated in the hands of one person called a ‘chairperson’ sitting at a regional head office.

Now it is being proposed that efforts to address such issues must start at primary (read village), district and regional levels. Fine words, but commissions will remain commissions – and could do precious little to resolve running disputes which run deeper than the jurisdiction of a commission, no matter how close it is to the people.

There was a time when we shouted ourselves hoary about decentralisation which, instead of resolving people’s concerns at close range brought red-tape even closer home. The fundamental problem is our propensity to resolve even mundane issues through probe teams and commissions which could have otherwise been put to rest through decisive leadership and clear-cut administrative solutions.

We also come hopelessly short when it comes to negotiations with so-called investors; we simply do not assign the right premium to our finite land resources and the right of our people to access, or at least, derive direct benefit from it where direct access isn’t possible.

Every time an investor comes, and wants a choice piece of land, the knee-jack response from our leaders is to remove the people, nay, dispossess them of their land – and negotiate terms of compensation based on the number of standing coconut trees or some awkward yardstick.

The fact that we are dispossessing our people isn’t part of the arithmetic of compensation; the fact that the people will be changing to a new livelihood doesn’t figure out as significant either; what matters is that an ‘all-important investor’ is here to “bring development” to us!

It is amazing why we do not take time to learn from others; why do we refuse to borrow a leaf from fellow Africans with arguably better negotiating skills that have given them value-for-land than our throw-away terms? For the sake of debate, a dispossessed villager gets $100 for each of his coconut trees, will he get another five standing trees – the only source of livelihood he knows about – with the $500 which he also needs to establish a new home, feed the family at a time when he will have left his plot of cassava as well? 

In Ghana, for instance, such details are adequately addressed. The authorities there were able to negotiate with the Ashanti Gold Mine at Obuasi what has become standard ‘land-for-land’ deals – plus a clause that requires the goldmine owners to meet the construction costs for new homes. At the old village of Bidem in Obuasi, Ashanti spent a whopping $1m resettling villagers to a truly ‘New Bidem.’

This isn’t fiction meant for the birds, as James Hadley Chase would put it. We are asking our authorities to start thinking ‘value-for-land’ first, then we shall not need any commissions

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