Maravi

(DAILY MONITOR UGANDA) Land Bill only answers half the question

Land Bill only answers half the question
Daniel Kalinaki

Picture this: You own 10 acres of land in Mukono, five of which are occupied by a tenant who settled there 40 years ago. The tenant grows vanilla and earns Shs2 million a year.

In return for using ‘your’ land, the tenant gives you a nominal rent of Shs1,000 – okay, let’s say, Shs100,000 per year. You feel that this is a tad unfair and decide to cash in your chips; you will sell the land and take what you can.

Under the Land (Amendment) Bill 2007 passed by Parliament last week, you have two options to reclaim ‘your’ land. One is to hope that the tenant defaults on the nominal rent for two years, up from one year, paving the way for you to go to court to get an order allowing you to evict the tenant.

The second option is to sell the land. The law, with good reason, says that you should give the first option to buy to the tenant. Assuming you can agree on a price that is fair to both parties, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Assume, however, that you ask for Shs10 million for the five acres but the tenant is willing to only pay Shs500,000?
Therein lies the problem with the Bill. While it does what it says on the tin – makes it harder for landlords to evict lawful or bona-fide tenants – it does not address the underlying problems with our land either for tenants or the landlords.

The core problem, in my view, is the dual and competing interests on land between the landlords who ‘own’ the land and the tenants or bibanja owners who occupy and use the land.
That landlord in Mukono cannot easily sell off his land and neither can he take it to the bank and borrow against it because it is ‘occupied’. However, the tenant is not that much better off; while he can’t easily be thrown off the land, he, too, faces hurdles in trying to sell it because he has to give the landlord the first right to buy.

This dilemma is not new; an informal secondary market in land has developed over the years where tenants negotiated with landlords to allow them buy the land they lived on, or sell it to third parties and give the landlords a cut in exchange for ceding full rights of ownership to the buyers.

Of course nothing in the law stops this practice from continuing, and there are tenants who genuinely need protection to stay on land they have lived on for generations.

However, the law is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. The more sustainable solution is to help tenants become landlords. This requires money, either through grants given through the Land Fund or concessional commercial lending guaranteed by the government with the land providing security.
The government says it lacks the money needed for a nationwide land redistribution project and has instead chosen the populist option of legislation.

Unfortunately, with the price and value of land rising every month and with our population doubling every generation, this is a problem whose solution becomes more expensive by the day. How long before the price of failure is paid in blood?

Mr Kalinaki is the managing editor of the Daily Monitor
dkalinaki@ug.nationmedia.com

Labels: LAND RIGHTS

posted by MrK @ 5:27 AM