AFRICANEWS

Tanzania

Land policies help impoverish indigenous communities

Land is being withdrawn from small indigenous community that has been left destitute and marginalised as land is re-allocated to new foreign investors most of whose credibility is doubtful.

"We all remember the case of Ken Sarowiwa, and the Ogun people in Nigeria; we recall the recent fracas in Zimbabwe, Kenya and now here in Tanzania," Balinagwe Mwambungu, chairman of the Journalists' Environmental Association of Tanzania (JET) reminded a land forum in Dar es Slaam recently.

For a country like Tanzania, whose economy depends mainly on agriculture, land is the biggest source of wealth, the basis for human existence and the hub around which revolve people's customs, culture and traditions.

"By and large, land ought to be the primary basis for people to build and nourish democracy," says Deus Kibamba, Programme Officer, Land Rights Research and Resource Institute, Dar es Salaam.

The current system in which the control of land is vested in the executive hands of the state is partly responsible for the denial of millions of peasants, pastoral communities and urban dwellers from owning land.

Professor Issa Shivji of the University of Dar es Salaam was recently quoted by the press as saying that the current land tenure system does not benefit indigenous people because the land policy does not aim at empowering them.

The official policy states that land is for public and has no value - a policy which has absolved both colonial and post-colonial governments from compensating the dispossessed of their lands for what is called 'public interests'.

But there are examples that demonstrate that the so-called public interests, as far as land with natural resources are concerned, are in many ways private interests at the expense of the whole community.

The Wahadzabe, who inhabit the area near Lake Eyasi in Arusha, Shinyanga and Singida provinces, are primarily a hunting and gathering community, whose livelihood depends on wildlife and other forest products.

The local press reported in June 1995 that this community was on the verge of extinction, because of denial of rights to own and use land in the area they occupy. The government had displaced them and granted a hunting licence to Tanzania Game Trackers, a company formerly owned by Mr. Robin Hurt, a Kenyan British, with about 20 hunting blocks in various parts of Tanzania.

The Wahadzabe were forced to move out of the area and leave the land to professional hunters. According to the 1974 Wildlife Conservation Act, the Wahadzabe, like all other people, could only hunt after obtaining a hunting permit and being allocated their quota. Therefore, for a fee of USD 7,500 per year to the government by hunters, a whole community of Wahadzabe was being sacrificed.

Furthermore, the Ngorongoro Crater is a homeland of the Wamaasai as well as Watatoga and Wahadzabe. When the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Ordinance came into effect in 1959, the Wamaasai, who had been moved to this area from Serengeti National Park a decade after its formation in 1940, conflicts began between them and the conservation authority.

While the indigenous people have not been allowed to engage in cultivation, the law gave the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA) the mandate to construct roads, bridges, aerodromes, buildings, fences and carry out any such work which was considered necessary by the Board of Directors for purposes of development or conservation.

Alienation and village land allocation to the rich by government officials had become the norm by 1980s. The land grabbers were doing so for either future security purposes or speculation, and not necessarily for investment purposes.

For instance, the granting of a lease of over 4,000 sq kilometres of Loliondo game reserve (Arusha) secretly to an Arab hunting Sheikh, Brigadier Mohammed Abdulrahim Al-Ally of the United Arab Emirates for hunting purposes in 1992 through a Kenyan based hunting company (Ortello), had presumably secret powerful interests locally. Twenty five Wamaasai villages were being affected.

There was a public outcry against this action, the result of which the government was forced to defend the legitimacy of its action to no avail.

Again in 1994 the government attempted to grant 381,000 acres of land in Monduli and Kiteto districts (Arusha) to a foreign investor, Mr Hermanus Philip Steyn, who had been formerly declared a persona non grata in 1983. The land was being taken away from pastoralists and other communities.

One would have expected that since a major part of the area falls under the Wildlife Department, the area should not have been granted to the investor. The government informed the investor that it expected him to abide by the Wildlife Conservation Act, but he could, of course kill animals within the land under the excuse of protection of life and property.

The removal of the Wamaasai has had an impact on their lives, since the reserve harbours the best grazing grounds, and the rest of the land is already settled by the Wapare agriculturalists. The result is that many of the Wamaasai have had to move to neighbouring Kenya and those who remained have become improverished. Some are moving to urban areas to join the army of Wamaasai watchmen in cities like Dar es Salaam.

The new land laws of 1999, which became effective from May this year, have not helped the marginalised indigenous people except for women who have now been granted rights to own land. The monopolistic nature of the state, which vests powers on rulers to take land occupied by the poor and auction it without compensation, has created bureaucracy with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

The government defends the new law saying it is intended to attract foreign investment in the agricultural sector and in other areas of activities related to land accupation. However, lawyers say it contravenes section 24(1) of the constitution which guarantees the right to private ownership of property and section 24(2) which guarantees against property expropriation. It also contraveness section 22 of the Tanzania Investment Centre Act of 1995, which calls for adequate and prompt compensation.

Land stakeholders say the land law came as a result of liberalisation forces as the country tries to woe foreign investors and not necessarily to see citizens owning land with freedom to dispose it at will.

Mr Kibamba maintains that any foreign capital attracted to land is essentially speculative in nature, commercial or predatory. 'The latter is interested in exploiting ecological resources such as bio-species, exotic timber, minerals, birds, wildlife trophies, game meat and so on. These have very adverse medium and long term effects on national development".

He notes that the legal regime should provide both recognition and adequate protection of the land rights of indigenous people and that these should be provided with legally entrenched security over land.

The Lawyers' Environmental Action Team (LEAT) has articulated and amplified the human rights abuses committed by foreign mining companies displacing local small miners. In a letter to President Benjamin Mkapa they detailed how the companies have failed to adequately compensate some of the victims both in Kahama and Geita districts of the Lake Victoria zone. It can be recalled that the artisan miners have filed a case in the High Court of Tanzania and the Court issued a temporary stop order.

If this is left to persist in Tanzania, concepts like food security and self-sufficiency, let alone development, will remain in books.

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