Abstract
The intricate link between political power and land rights is a historical axiom and Zimbabwe and Uganda present two conflicting yet analogous situations of what happens in agrarian societies, where socio-economic life is organised around access to and use of land. In such communities, institutions of land tenure are powerful mediums that shape political relations, electoral choices and the whole landscape of political interactions that happen in rural communities. This article seeks to examine how the post-colonial state in Zimbabwe and Uganda deliberately and systematically manipulated ‘insecure’ land tenure regimes by deploying institutions as instruments of political control and relevance. We argue that while the British coloniser framed the two counties differently, that is Zimbabwe as a settler colony and Uganda as a native colony, post-colonial land tenure regimes in the two countries were framed as institutional configurations purposefully designed and redesigned by national leaders as instruments of building state authority, organising the rural masses politically and shaping state-citizen allegiances. In this context, we argue that the land reforms in both countries perpetuated economic and regional disparities, inherited from colonial economic policies, and the ethnic and racial divisions, as foundations of state-making. In that regard, the connection between land and political authority may appear delinked and far-fetched, yet, as the Ugandan and Zimbabwean cases illustrate, there is compelling evidence to confirm this contention.
What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944.
Introduction
The construction of political authority and power hierarchies in the African state-building enterprises has been intimately linked to questions of land access and rights. Central to this discourse has been the role of an over-bearing central state in determining the institutions of land administration and allocation, especially in rural areas where the bulk of the peasant economy resides. 1 The unsettled extension of the political apparatus of state to embrace the wholesome rural administration and social organisation has been one of the pervasive features of the post-colonial state in Africa. In the construct of post-colonial state, institutions that grant access to land have come to play a key role in mediating state–society relations. In this context, therefore, African land tenure regimes need to be understood as complexities of institutions that structure countries’ political arenas and link rural populations to the state.
In her fascinating inquiry of the extent to which patterns of rural politics are results of Africa’s modernising and state-building projects, Boone 2 argues that the government in Africa is grounded in institutions of rural property rights that create relations of political dependency and authority to define lines of social cooperation and competition as well as segmenting territory and delineating jurisdiction. These structures also shape collective action and drive the politics in rural Africa. Kuba and Lentz (2006) further accentuate this argument and point out that in Africa, land issues have increasingly become vulnerable to politics of identity and belonging. The duo posits that land is everything. Why is this so? Because belonging to the land guarantees the rights of the present as well as the future generations. In essence, land allows those who have holding and user rights to it, to enter into the political economy of land and land questions. That said, it is important to stress that recording tenure rights is not enough in itself. Why? Because rights are ever in a constant state of change: they are adjusted by sales, tenancy agreements and inheritances interests among others. For, by their very nature, tenure rights can be changed little by little through the development of social relationships strengthened by informal or local institutions and in more radical ways modified by the state. In many African societies, managing land rights is often done according to unwritten rules, known and accepted by all the stakeholders at the local level and which can be very different from one place to another. This constitutes rules about the classes of individuals, or groups who have access to property rights, who can assign, transfer, enforce or adjudicate rights. Hall and Soskice (2001, pp. 46) employ the notion of regimes as interlocking systems of complimentary institutions, social, economic and political that can structure interaction at macro-national levels and perhaps sectoral levels. In that vein, land tenure regimes are deeply embedded within the larger political processes of state-formation and are themselves constructs of the political elites in their deliberate efforts to create political order and manipulate rural constituencies. Integrally, these patterns of rural politics are themselves a product of Africa’s modernising and state-building project.
In most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, land issues have increasingly become susceptible to politics and identity, because land is not only a scarce commodity but it is also a central definer of belonging and gives guarantees to the present as well as the future generations. By extension, land rights aid the creation of identities and citizenship, paving a pathway to enter the political economy of land and land-rights question (Lentz, 2006). Land has become a very important commodity in regulating socio-political interaction and defining a myriad of relationships in the national matrix. While traditional approaches to land in Africa have placed emphasis on production and other technical aspects, later scholarship such as that provided by Charles Tilly (2001) has noted how land tenure policies are also products of political processes. Daniel Appiah (2012) in his study of the evolution of tenurial systems in Ghana attests that land administration is embedded with the larger political processes of state-formation and political processes of conflict, cooperation and negotiations between rulers, and other interests in the concentration of coercion over land shape the nature of the rules that govern land administration across states (Appiah, 2013). Jocelyn Alexander (2006c) traces the construction and reconstruction of the agrarian landscape as well as the making and unmaking of political authority in the rural spaces. Alexander illuminates on the dialectical relationship between land and authority and the politics of land in the process of state making during the colonial and post-colonial periods.
In this article, we seek to demonstrate how the post-colonial state in Uganda and Zimbabwe deliberately and systematically institutionalised ‘insecurity of tenure’ through land tenure regimes as instruments of political control, power, loyalty and relevance, intelligently conducted through territories of command and control. We provide a comparative institutional lens to visualise institutional change and political power construction in two post-colonies. We argue that while the Britain as coloniser framed the two countries differently, making Zimbabwe as a settler colony and Uganda as a native-colony, post-colonial land tenure regimes in the two countries have been institutionally configured and redesigned by national leaders as instruments of state-building, authority, organising and mobilising the rural masses to politically respond to authority at the centre, as a way of shaping state–citizen allegiances. We locate the experiences of the two countries’ state-building within the larger context of land tenure regimes as key on structuring of rural politics in post-colonial Africa. That said, these institutions have in various ways contributed to the transformation of Uganda and Zimbabwe into spaces of power capture.
The article utilises comparative institutional analysis as a methodological aspect of new institutionalism related to situations in which the traditional approaches of institutionalism operate (Thelen & Steinmo, 1992). It is used to illustrate how institutions perform in varying circumstances. Why? Because institutional performance is a product of the people, their path and geography in which institutions operate. In this particular undertaking, we contend with historical exceptionality and geographical peculiarity of the two states, while at the same time we take cognition of the broader processes in which state-building is imbedded. Geographically, the two countries are brought under a historical assessment that views them as instances of conflicting historical process of state-formation. Specifically, we analyse these variations in the patterns of both agrarian transformation and political conflict across these geographies (Zimbabwe and Uganda) and across particular historical moments from colonial and post-colonial eras. In this article, we ask two important questions: First; what is the role of land engineering which accompanies the uncertain game of re-composing local power? Second, what are the available development capacities that were used in the varied levels of institutional hierarchy?
The first part of the article will provide background information by examining the colonial tenure regimes and how they were constructed as part of colonial policy of political control and subjugation of the indigenous populations as well as the need to use indigenous systems of political authority in the countryside. As an example, it will then link Zimbabwe’s pre-colonial constructions of communal tenure with the post-colonial state’s own construction of communal tenure and the need to deconstruct the institution of chieftaincy which was codified by the Communal Lands Act of 1982 in Zimbabwe. The section will discuss the new institutions of rural land administration in both countries. For instance, in Zimbabwe, there was the Village Development Committees (VIDCOs), the District Councils and how these were used to mediate state and community relations and became points of ideologisation of rural society and political control. In the same length, we shall visit the institutionalisation of the peasant rights, especially in Central Uganda as well as the promotional of communal efforts in other parts of the country. This will indulge us into the new role of local authority in land tenure promoted after amendment of the Communal Lands Act in 1998 in Zimbabwe as was the Amendment of the 1998 Land Act in Uganda. These will be analysed to demonstrate how the land institutional renovations became appendages of the ruling parties’ control of the rural electorate.
The second part of the article examines the land reform and political settlement processes within the conceptual gaze of the varied ‘territorialisation’ projects in both states. For instance, in Zimbabwe, just like in Uganda, the state politicised spaces in the fast-track resettlement areas by erecting the infrastructure of coercion, influence, authority and manipulation through a number of tools, foremost among being the granting of manipulated titles to land, extending the patron–client networks to the rural communities. Clearly, it will be observed that in both Uganda and Zimbabwe, politics and electioneering are key in determining institution for land governance as illuminated by the concept of land for votes and the creation of varied structures to act as institutions of administering land. Further, this section will also give a cursory examination of the localised conflicts and contestation for land resources within these spaces. Lastly, in the conclusion, the article seeks to provoke a rethinking of the role of the post-colonial state in land and critiques the statist theory of development which has been at the core of most post-colonial African state-building.
Institutionalism and the Construction of Tenure relations in Zimbabwe and Uganda
‘Land is widely regarded as being central feature to the politics of the colonial and post-colonial state, whether in a peasant state like Uganda or a settler post-colonial Zimbabwe. This makes and the state’s role in controlling tenure paramount’. This opening statement by Angela Cheater in her work which analyses communal tenure models in post-colonial and colonial Zimbabwe succinctly captures the fundamental attributes of all land-tenure systems which were erected in Zimbabwe as being conscious products of state political choreographing predicated on the contingencies of authority, power, control, influence, coercion and subordination (Cheater, 1990). The colonial state was built on the conquest of the indigenous Shona and Ndebele communities in the late 1890s by the British South African Company which had led to the establishment of a settler colony. The process of conquest involved dispossession of land and the usurpation of the power and authority of the native communities and the creation of alternative locus of power and authority. Central to construction of power and authority was access to land.
Drinkwater (1989) comments that the growing power of the colonial state from 1893 onwards was based on state control of land use and tenure, a process in which the distribution of land was the state’s central concern. In 1898, after the end of the First Chimurenga rebellion, the colonial state invoked an Order in Council which created native reserves in the marginal and arid parts of the country. In 1930, the Land Apportionment Act codified the racial division of land along racial lines (Chenaux-Repond, 1993). The segmentation of land was such that the European areas were allocated 50.8% of the land in the colony, Native reserves were awarded a paltry 22.4% of the total land and native purchase areas got 7.7% while unassigned areas constituted 18.4% (Beverly & Peters, n.d.) The Native Purchase areas were established as centres where wealthier peasants could buy their land and this was to further the goal of separating them from uniting with the masses. In the rest of the native reserves, the settlers instituted a communal land tenure system where rights to land were allocated by the traditional chiefs. But why create class distinction of natives in the colony? The answer to this question can be located in Karl Marx’s thoughts on the feudal countryside and the relation to the natural economy. Marx opines that feudal production to be judged properly must be considered as a mode of production founded on antagonism. Here we need to appreciate how wealth was produced through antagonism. This phenomenon demonstrates how one class went on growing until the material conditions for its emancipation had attained full maturity. To Marx, this was the foundation of the colonial economic enterprise to maintain a denigrated and jeopardised class for the production and supply of raw materials to the metropolitan bourgeoisie and revenue to the state. In Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe in particular, large tracts of lands are controlled by the state, and this is mirrored through various property relations. Communal tenure was largely an ideological construction to rationalise land divisions and create an effective basis for the indirect control of land, the native population and natural resources by the traditional chiefs (Cheater, 1990, p. 189).
In Zimbabwe, the state power and political authority over forested and water territories is expressed specifically through powers over the allocation of land and related resources, the institutions of land tenures and land use, and through state structures responsible for the resolution of disputes and conflicts which arise from competing claims over land. Such control is accompanied by extensive state influence over the allocation and use of water and natural resources, and through this and other economic policies, the state direct financial resources and incentives, which influence patterns of land utilisation. Clearly so, African states broker and build power structures largely through the control of land and natural resources’ allocations and land tenure regulations, using various systems of distribution. In that regard, land reforms represent potential and actual changes in the extensive land resource allocations, regulatory powers and institutions of the state, traditional authorities and emerging forms of capital.
In Uganda, land tenure relations during the colonial period have been subjected to enormous scholarly analysis. These relations have been evaluated as wrought arrangements designed for purposes of providing convenient political and administration control of native communities in both colonial and post-colonial situations. For example, the agency of the traditional chiefs who also doubled landholding class played a phenomenal role in state-formation and African state-building enterprise. For instance, the 1900 Buganda Agreement provided for the permitting of close to 1000 miles of free-hold land to Buganda Chiefs. Yet, by 1926 this allocation had been multiplied 10-fold as a result of inheritance and sale of land. This, in-itself saw not only an increase in the number of titled landholding class but also the power and stake of this class. Although the colonial government in Uganda was built on the official philosophy of ‘indirect rule’, its policies towards the indigenous tenure system were far from indirect. Mailo land tenure – a form of private freehold ownership, but with restrictions on land alienation – was introduced in Buganda in 1900. That was followed by the introduction of native freehold tenure in Toro in 1900 and Ankole in 1901. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1903 gave the British colonial authorities power to alienate land in freehold. Although very few freeholds were introduced under the Crown Lands Ordinance, together with leaseholds introduced on crown land, they implicitly sought a radical transformation of the customary tenure system (Mugerwa, 1973; Richards, 1973; West, 1964, 1972).
Mamdani (1976), in his analysis of the same, illustrated how landlords began to use their ownership of land to increase their control of the economic surplus. This took various forms including rent proceeds extracted from land tenants, commonly known as obusulu. Furthermore, with the increase in the production of coffee and cotton on the land rented by the tenants, the Buganda parliament commonly known as Lukiiko legislated that a tithe of the quantity of coffee and cotton grown on the rented land ought to be paid to the landlord. This form of appropriation exponentially transformed the value of land and inadvertently the power of the landlords to the colonial state. This is because the state’s portion of the surplus came in the form of taxes for this purpose increased. Indeed, the colonial state undertook numerous agreements with a number of kingdoms in the South such as Ankole and Tooro, and specified the number of taxes that could be collected from the producers and was effectively institutionalised. 3
In light of the above, it emerged that landlords became part of the institutional tax ecosystem and they used their surplus-collecting position to extract from the tenants, just the same way they used this position to oppress and denigrate the tenants. The landlords also used their position to falsify the proceeds from the land rent. 4 This created institutionalised injustice on the side of the tenants. For instance, it meant that a landlord with many tenants paying him a rent and a tithe only paid as much, per head, as his poorer tenants. Without doubt, processed law relating to land in the colonial territories reflected the pronounced interests of the ruling class. Whereas law-making was in the hands of the members of the ruling class and it served their interests, the particular form such a law took, and the ways in which it was projected into the societal arena, was a derivative of events in the course of inter- and intra-class struggles against one another, and the compromises they finally reached.
In essence, institutional injustice in the colonial epoch was no exception, it was only extreme in some cases. Following the sense of institutional injustice on the side of the tenants in Buganda, in the subsequent Ankole Landlord and Tenant Law (1937), the landlord–tenant relationship was regulated to minimise the obligation to the landlords and strengthen the peasants who were the productive base of the agricultural sector as well as protecting them from eviction. This institutional renovation contained in the subsequent Ankole Landlord and Tenant Law of 1937, in many ways, represents the hierarchies of power and interests between the colony and metropole and how these were mediated, suggesting the flexibility of the legislative process within the precipitously developing colonial state and its function in routinising change. It also validated the conventional view relating to the way policy was translated into an ordinance which reflected the real politics of the colonial situation in several dependencies.
In a larger measure, the above scenario also demonstrates the colonial effort in acquainting itself with the local circumstances to apprise formal institutions for the colony. Indeed, over time, a kibanja tenancy came to amount to a de facto form of freehold tenure, except that the occupant did not own full rights to the land. The Busuulu and Envujjo laws guaranteed the security of tenure of the kibanja tenant. After independence in 1962, the protection of customary land rights was provided for in the Public Land Act of 1969. A person could legally occupy, in customary tenure, any rural land not alienated in leasehold or freehold. The controlling authority could only grant a freehold/leasehold on any land occupied by customary tenure with the consent of the customary holder. Channock (1998) in his analysis of the early colonial period land tenures of Zambia and Malawi posits that colonial period land tenure systems were much about imposing control over rural populations and the need to impose and establish new forms of state-recognised authority over rural people. The colonial governors did not seek direct control over agricultural production or direct control over land but rather sought to keep most of the population in the rural areas, subsisting and producing as farmers or pastoralists and to control populations’ mobility by fixing individuals and families within delimited territories designed as ethnic homelands.
The imperative for the above was based on the need to construct low-cost institutions of exerting political and social control over the indigenous populations. The low-cost institutions as in the case of Zimbabwe was a vestige from the colonial era, which constituted a contradiction with customary law. Customary law and modern law are in a constant state of conflict. Yet these informal rules have a wider scope of application, meaning that customary law needs to be taken into account. In this regard, therefore, land tenure design was thus used as one of those key institutions of political control. This included the creation of natural tribal communities, fixing the boundaries of the micro-territories that were designed as their ancestral homelands and codifying relations of political hierarchy within these geographic units. This also extended to the mediation of class relations as the Uganda and Zimbabwean cases demonstrate. For instance, Mbiba (2001) makes a compelling argument that in Zimbabwe, the Native Reserves of colonial state were created as racialised collection zones to service the set of rules and regulations in the management of native populations and this included the reinforcement of the ‘communal land construct’. This construct in Mbiba’s characteristic words was only meant as a way of ‘denying Africans urban citizenship’ and confining them to particular geographic spaces. Other colonial legislations like the 1967 Land tenure Act and The Tribal Trust Lands Act simply emphasised the pronounced role of the communal tenure construct in colonial thinking as well as the primacy of traditional authority over land in the communal areas.
The post-colonial Zimbabwe state thus inherited one of the most bifurcated land tenure systems from the colonial state at independence in 1980 which was regimented along the racial lines. Mamdani thus reflects that post-colonial states succeeded in de-racialising but not in democratising the authoritarian characteristics of indirect rule. This Mamdani argue was the most dangerous legacy as it stands as the key obstacle to democratisation and political stability and an accountable state (Mamdani, 1996). The post-colonial government’s major thrust was to dismantle the colonial institutions of rural administration which were based on ‘decentralised despotism’ and institute modernisation of the rural communities through integrating them into the larger national sphere. Key to this modernisation strategy was the imperative of restructuring rural land property and power relations (Alexander, 2006a, p. 2). 5
The Communal Lands Act of 1982 provided the statutory framework for the post-colonial government’s interaction with the rural society. The Act restructured centres of authority in the communal areas and reshaped the administrative paraphernalia of the rural communities. While during the colonial period, several pieces of legislation had firmly established the traditional chiefs as primary centres of land administration in the communal areas with allocative powers, the 1982 Act divested these powers from the traditional chiefs and handed them over to elected authority in the name of the Rural District Councils (RDCs), the VIDCOs as well as the Ward Development Committees (WADCOs), respectively. In addition to the above, the Act conveyed usufruct rights for land in communal areas and placed ownership of all communal land with the President who would permit it to be occupied according to statute. The 1982 Act repealed the colonial Tribal Lands Act of 1979 which had reserved all powers in reserves with the president and had aimed at increasing the powers of the Minister of internal Affairs to intervene in matters of land. The statute gave overriding authority over the allocation and use of land to the RDC within which the communal land fell. The RDCs would issue settlement permits as tenure certificates to each household. Munro argues that the 1982 Act created a separate legal status for the communal areas which was anchored in the different property regimes of freehold and those of the communal areas and the different concepts of political rights that accrued to those regimes which underwrote the different concepts of social being and citizenship. This distinction to use the words of Munro ‘was most poignantly captured’ in the definition of voter eligibility laid down in the 1988 RDCs Act which emphasised property as a distinct qualification (Munro, 1998, p. 266).
Further still, the Act took property as a yardstick for voter qualification in the non-communal areas and only residency as a yardstick for those occupying the communal areas. In non-communal areas, farm workers born in the area but not owning or renting property were not eligible to vote although alien property owners could vote. What is conspicuous within this state construction was a deliberate disenfranchisement on the basis of property ownership directly targeting rural dwellers falling outside the scope of state control through land ownership. The VIDCO was the lowest unit of government administration representing 100 households and approximately 100 people, the WADCO represented six villages and it coordinated all plans from VIDCOs within its jurisdiction. The WADCOs would then report to the District Council representing elected councillors from each ward. The whole system was hierarchically connected to the central state via the provincial structures of administration which had linkages to the state ministries. It can be rightly argued that this new administrative invention was part and parcel of the post-colonial government’s grand scheme of increasing the control of the state over rural communities. Early post-colonial state building projects were largely about de-collectivisation, demobilising and reasserting control over rural populations and restraining the arbitrariness of chiefly prerogative and eliminating taxes extracted by chiefs.
Post-colonial governments in most sub-Saharan countries were making great efforts to promote free-holder access to land in cooperating rural communities into the post-colonial political and economic systems. This was, however, in varying ways, and dependent of the colonialised infrastructure. In Zimbabwe, Just like in Uganda, one way of achieving this was through altering authority-based relationships and making land a political as much as an economic asset to be employed in the construction of the post-colonial order (Boone, 2013). In doing so, the state began to view headman and traditional structures of authority as conservative and backward and anathema to the new social and political spheres being etched by the state in the rural communities during the early 1980s. The modernising writ of the state in the communal and resettlement communities was heavily anchored on the need to create new social and political forces free from the control of customary authority and where traditional methods of farming would be discarded in favour of modern ones. The Act was also conceived of as a way of punishing chiefs for their role as collaborators with the colonial state during the colonial period.
The main thrust of the post-colonial state in rural society was to create institutions which could mediate the relations of control and accountability between state and the communities. The villagisation strategy which was embraced by the state was deliberately authored to engineer the political and ideological transformation and penetration of institutions that managed common resources like land. In this strategy, VIDCOs became conduits for political patronage at the local level linking whole communities with the broader power of state. The VIDCOs and WADCOs were organs of the ruling political party for its grass root mobilisation strategy and control of rural populations. Moyo (2001) attests that the infiltration of the VIDCOs and WADCOs by the ruling party made these structures of administration nothing more than an extension of the ruling party. In the WADCOs and VIDCOs, two positions were reserved for the ZANU PF youth and women’s league members. By this process, the ruling party and state were able to strongly control the rural populations and exert an inexorable system of manipulation.
Munro (1998) reflects that the fragmentary character of state authority in the countryside at independence accentuated state’s efforts to expand authority to the rural areas and this was largely done through constructing institutions of resource control and conservation at village level, social development and the establishment of the VIDCO and villagisation in order to re-orient the politics of rural communities and mediate state peasant relations. The restructuring of communal land administration and tenure landscape in 1982 created clashes and conflicts for authority in most communal farming areas between traditional authority and VIDCOs and the political elites in the RDCs over the right to allocate land. As a consequence of these various contestations for authority in the communal areas, the government commissioned a study into land tenure systems in the country. In 1994, the study concluded that each tenure system be made much more secure by explicitly identifying the lands rights and encouraging greater continuity of those by the holder. The Commission also recommended the passing of full rights over land from the state to members of the village assembly and an executive chaired by the kraal head. It called for the mapping and survey of all communal land and the issuance of registration certificates to households for residential and arable land. The Commission believed that if these certificates could be used as collateral for credit, it would unlock the value of communal land and create incentives for investment. The recommendations however were never implemented for the obvious reason that they aimed at dismantling the institutions of land tenure which had constantly legitimated the presence of the state in the communal areas.
In the late 1990s with the state under pressure from the growing political opposition and labour unrest, traditional centres of authority once again became very viable sources of alliance to control and coerce the rural electorate which was increasingly becoming an important constituency in the political fortunes of the ruling party. The Communal Lands Act was amended to give greater power and authority to chiefs over the control and allocation of land. The Communal Land Act of 1998 restored the powers of traditional leadership and made them a key ally of the state in its struggles with the political opposition. Amongst the most important roles that traditional leadership got restored in the new law included the duty and responsibility to allocate communal land, preventing unauthorised settlement and use of land, noticing the RDC of any intended disposal of land and adjudicating and resolving land disputes.
The new Act granted village heads and chiefs control over land allocation in the communal areas and defining local citizenship. Alexander (2006b) views the move as reflecting an overt ideological shift away from the state’s democratising and modernising efforts of the 1980s. With the allocative powers over land, the chiefs became very instrumental in the construction of belonging and access in rural communities and were at the centre of the ruling party’s political strategy to coerce and manipulate the rural population into voting for them. This aspect is prevalent in most post-colonial states where neo-customary leaders have remained gatekeepers and local strong men for state power-mediating local citizens access, not only to land but also to many of the opportunities offered by the government (Bierschenke & Olivier de Sardon, 2003, p. 164). The electoral potential of customary authority was evident in the capacity of chiefs to in some jurisdictions and territories mobilise electoral blocks for the nationalist parties. Busia’s (1951) writing in the 1950s noted that the traditional forms of social organisation were a kind of natural mechanism for mobilising rural votes. Chiefs used their position to deny land access to the opposition supporters, and in a number of cases used their position to evict them from their homesteads for being sympathetic to the main opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
In post-colonial Africa, rural constituencies often look like ‘one-party state’ where in the words of Schattschneider (1960, p. 83), ‘elections are won not by competing with the opposition party but by eliminating it’. The ability of those in positions of political authority to offer land access or land tenure security in exchange for political compliance has constituted a source of political leverage over rural communities and rural votes in the post colony (Boone, 2013). The victimisation of opposition supporters through restricted land access and expulsion from the rural areas is well documented and was highly successful in marking the rural constituencies as exclusive domains of the ruling party during most of the elections in Zimbabwe since 2000. To illuminate this, in 2010, Chief Nhema spear-headed the move to evict more than 50 people who were suspected members of the MDC from the Fure Pangweni irrigation scheme on the ostensible reason that the move was meant to decongest the area of the high number of settlers. This move was carried out with the connivance of the local district administrator and the ruling ZANU PF party (VOP, 2010).
In other parts of the country, it was common practice for chiefs to call for meetings on behalf of the ruling party and the opposition supporters were threatened with having their land confiscated and given to ruling party supporters. The institutions of traditional leaders also came to play a critical role as intermediaries and/or brokers not only to access land but also to have access to input credit facilities, food and grain relief. Chiefs and headmen were also able to use their positions as political tools of coercing villagers to be integrated into the structures of the ruling party and to vote for it. Boone strongly affirms the coercive capabilities of traditional authorities within neo-customary systems and locates this within the ‘dependence of rural families on the good graces of these local intermediaries, the chiefs and their secular counter parts to deliver votes to national politicians at election time’ (Boone, 2009). Chiefs, village and headmen have also been implicated for playing a crucial role in rigging and affecting the outcome of the recently conducted election in Zimbabwe by politically mobilising their subjects to vote for ZANU PF. 6
In post-colonial Uganda, the year 1975 witnessed Idi Amin’s Land Reform Decree (1975) which rescinded the Busuulu and Envujjo law of 1928 and nationalised the land. The decree was premeditated to remove barriers to landholding rights of the landlords as opposed to the peasants and institutionalised by the 1900 agreement and protected by the 1928 Busuulu and Envujjo law. By nationalisation of land, the state sought to bring egalitarianism particularly in central Uganda. What is surprising, however, is that the land titles created by the 1900 Agreement were allowed to be transformed into 49- and 99-year leases granted by the state. In this regard, the peasants who were tenants on the same land became sub-leased. In effect, no equalisation was actually realised for tenants, as observed by both Mamdani (1987) and Nyangabyaki Bazaara (1994). The duo confirms that the reform did pave a way for a new wave of a bitter relationship between tenants and landlords. The bitterness stemmed from the loss of rents from their expansive parcels of land. With landlords seeing no rent coming from their expansive land, many of landlords began to evict tenants off their land.
A Comparative Review of the Land Reformations: Zimbabwe’s Territorialising Project and Uganda’s Peasantalisation Project
Rutherford in his article on land reform in Zimbabwe in 2005 used the concept of what he termed ‘land and territorialising projects’ to more conveniently fit the issues of authority and control within the framework of Zimbabwe’s land reform debate. To Rutherford, this novel conceptual design is useful in understanding the varied political attempts made to control and influence the Zimbabwean people and their social relations through land resettlement policies. Rutherford notes:
…narratives explicitly engaged in the debates about
the politics of Zimbabwe tend to gloss over the diverse political projects involved
around land in Zimbabwe. Projects that speak to varying territorializing efforts
at different scales of action are often intertwined with livelihood and accumulation ambition
The concept of ‘territorialisation’ was pioneered by Nancy Pelusso (2003) who defines it as ‘an attempt by an individual or group of individuals, to affect, influence or control people and phenomenon by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area’. Rutherford observed the whole livelihoods pattern of rural Zimbabwe as being intertwined with access and control over land and from this imperative the land reform and resettlement debate has to be grasped through the framework of ‘territorialisation’. In this section of the article, I will employ the ‘territorialisation’ conceptual tool to examine the control of geo-political spaces in the resettlement areas of Zimbabwe by the state and the emerging institutions of coercion based on access and control over land.
In 1980, when Zimbabwe got its independence, the Lancaster House constitutional provisions with respect to land stipulated in Section 16 that for the next 10 years the government could only purchase land from the white settlers on ‘willing-buyer/willing-seller terms’. Meanwhile, the British government made undertaking to purchase land for resettlement of the black peasants. The state’s land policy at independence emphasised the promotion of equitable access to land, creating political stability and acceptable property rights regimes, promoting economic growth through wider equity and efficiency gained from land redistribution and promoting national food security and self-sufficiency. All this was pursued through market-based land reform and resettlement through stable, legally backed legislative reforms. In the first decade of independence, the need for political stability and the need for national reconciliation very much determined government agrarian policies and restrained the pursuit of a more radical land agenda. By 1989, 52,000 families had been resettled less than a third of the target of 162,000. The land transferred by 1990 represented less than 3.5% of total rural land (Zimbabwe Institute, n.d.). The first stage of resettlement concentrated on two main types of villagisation models, based on a communal agriculture and the other based on household production. Here, beneficiaries were given land permits which did not have collateral value and which only extended usufruct rights to land. With the expiry of the moratorium on the Lancaster house provisions on land in 1990, the government came up with the Land Acquisition Act in 1992 which sought to compulsorily acquire land. The new legislation could however not achieve much as the government did not have many resources to compensate the white settlers.
The late 1990s saw the emergence of a new trend in Zimbabwean politics where the dominance of the ruling party was under challenge from a host of civil and political actors like civil society bodies, trade union movements and students all of which were calling for the opening up of democratic space. The severe economic challenges brought on by the structural adjustment program and the accompanying financial meltdown put the government in severe spotlight and severely unsettled the ruling party. It is in this context that scholarship has located and conceptualised the Zimbabwean land reform debate as the culmination of a political strategy of survival through controlling land and exerting authority in the rural landscape. To illustrate this, Alexander argues that as the ruling party began to come under threat from the political opposition, it sought to re-value the land question and sought new means of state building (Alexander, 2006b, p. 181). This was even more illuminated in the face of sporadic farm invasions by peasants, which were happening in different parts of the country.
Moyo (2013) however offers a counter argument to the above claim. He sees the farm occupation movement as an expression of a political and social vacuum in the leadership of the land reform agenda. He situates the land occupation movement in the historical dynamics of the post-colonial state where there never was an ‘organised civil society’ to make radical demands for land reform and land redistribution. This emergent civil society in the post-colonial state, Moyo argues, was predominantly middle class and with strong international aid linkages which predictably militated against its pursuit of a radical land reform agenda. Within this strategic vacuum, the political elites of the ruling party first engineered the early land occupation movements and also controlled its resurgence by ensuring that ZANU PF would address it. Moyo thus locates the land occupation movement within the context of a civil society leadership vacuum which failed to deliver and thus precipitated a centralist and commandist model of land redistribution in 2000. The referendum defeat of the ruling party in 2000 ahead of the looming parliamentary and presidential polls in 2002 respectively presented the political elites with a serious challenge to their authority and their option was to mobilise war veterans and peasants to participate in farm invasions and occupations. This was accompanied by various statutory changes to land legislation. Article 16A which became law in April 2000 extended the grounds for compulsory acquisition of land with no compensation for improvements on the land except for developments on the farms. The amendment also placed the responsibility for compensation on Britain, the former colonial master.
In May 2000, the Presidential Powers Act removed the need for first designating land before acquisition. A subsequent legislation in November empowered government to resettle people on acquired farms immediately after serving the farm’s owner with acquisition orders. The land occupation blitzkrieg by the ruling party was politically constructed to act as a part of machinery of control and coercion in the spaces of the countryside where the opposition was establishing a significant foothold. In their election campaign of 2000, which they went on to win by a very narrow majority, the ruling party’s campaign slogan was ‘land is the economy and the economy is land’. Alexander notes that the land occupations were not just about making a case for land redistribution, but they were also for creating the conditions of a particular kind of political campaign which was intended to appeal to the party’s most numerous constituencies, the communal areas and at the same time punish constituencies supporting the opposition in those areas (Alexander, 2006b).
The evolving structures of land tenure systems and regimes in the newly resettled areas and the territorialising project by the state deserve special attention as it is in these tenure constructs that political relations have been negotiated and configured by the state over the last 13 years or so. Matondi (2013) points out that the land tenures in the newly resettled farms are becoming new sites of struggle in the development trajectory of Zimbabwe much because of the uncertainty that surrounds land tenure under the banner of the Fast Track Land Resettlement Program. Matondi cursorily notes, ‘Tenure has become an object of struggle between multiple groups at local and national level’ (Matondi, 2013, p. 128). The tenurial arrangements in the A1 model are constructed closely along the customary system of land allocation, administration and adjudication. The land remains owned by the state and occupants are given offer letters which do not consign security of tenure and are not bankable as collateral. The offer letter does not give the occupier irrevocable entitlements to land and it can be withdrawn any time without the government obligated to compensate for any improvements on the land. The state converted free-hold tenure in the commercial farms into 99-year lease agreements leased out to black A2 farmers. These too did not confer upon the user absolute rights to the land. The tenurial models in the fast-track resettlement areas were deliberately designed to ensure tenure insecurity and create a fluid rural landscape which can easily be channelled into the state’s streams of authority and power all of which were important assets in the electoral chicaneries of the ruling party. In the beginning of this section, we noted Rutherford’s concept of the territorialising project as an important theoretical tool to grasp the emerging centres of authority, control and power in the resettlement communities after the fast-track land reform program. Rutherford categorises this as happening at three levels. The first one is a broader level which involves the state and the resettled communities. At this level, the object of the state was not merely that of redistributing land to the landless black people but it also involves the imperative to control the land and the inhabitants more comprehensively to control their structures of administration and spheres of territory.
Matondi (2013) has further emphasised that land tenure institutions in the fast-track resettlement communities of Mazowe identified how the state streamlined its own institutional formations into the structures of the party and used these as formal administrative units (Matondi, 2013). In this process, war veterans and chiefs in the newly resettled communities were highly important as intermediaries of state power. The infrastructure of ZANU PF authority was inscribed deeply into every echelon of each local administrative unit and influential war veterans, party activists often controlled local government in the resettled farms. These institutional structures were at the forefront in mobilising the rural vote for the ruling party and ensuring that the opposition could not get access to the rural electorate.
The above situation is comparable to Uganda following the 1998 land reforms. A new land law was instituted based on the 1995 Constitution and it bore the imprinting of the National Resistance Movement, the ruling party. The new law substituted Idi Amin’s Land Reform Decree of 1975 that had previously vested land in the Uganda Land Commission (ULC) and converted all freehold titles to leasehold. The 1998 land law was celebrated by many, especially the peasants, as a law that vests land in the hands of the majority of citizens and recognised customary tenure. The 1998 Land Law is explicitly recognised as a ‘customary tenure’. It also ‘strengthened’ the position of peasant squatters (bibanja holders) albeit to the displeasure of the landlords especially in Buganda. There were two areas of foremost concern for the government. To begin with, the government needed to develop a land policy that would promote agricultural and economic development as well as poverty eradication in the country. Additionally, there was the issue of land rights. The government was aware that the clamour for land rights was a cardinal concern for most ordinary Ugandans. Hence, with the backing of the World Bank and several development partners, the government commissioned various national and international advisors to assist with formulating the most appropriate land tenure policy.
The 1998 Land Act and the debates around it share an overriding assumption that institutionalising titling is essential to increasing investment in agriculture and that would increase the flow of capital into the countryside, a factor that is key to increasing agricultural production. And for such capital to flow into the rural spaces, security of tenure for the peasants had to be guaranteed and this was at the cornerstone of the 1998 Land Act. Indeed, the 1998 Land Act points to the need to resolve the impasse between the registered owners (mailo, freehold and leasehold land) and the lawful occupants of this land-largely tenants. But, this imperative did not hold in light of Uganda’s agrarian history, especially through the colonial period. Clearly, it is observable that the 1998 Land Act and the subsequent amendment in 2010 was framed on the political fort of the peasants. For, the need to guarantee security of tenure and security of land rights was advanced as the fundamental reasoning for the 1998 Land Act.
President Yoweri Museveni, the Principal advocate for the 1998 Land Act, argued that securing peasant land rights would enhance agricultural production as well as making it possible for peasants’ access to credit. However, in doing this, the 1998 Land Act complicated matters by institutionalising contradictory claims on land. For instance, the Act gave security of tenure to tenants through certificates of occupancy, while at the same time leaving landlords with legal title to the competing claims on land. In this instance, the act gives security of tenure to tenants through certificates of occupancy, while at the same time leaving landlords with legal title. In many ways, this represents a reproduction of tenure insecurity (Kisekka-Ntale, 2019). The above scenario suggests that 1998 Land Act inadvertently created an insecure land tenure regime that systematically maintained the presence of a powerful landlord on the one hand, and the on another, a somewhat insecure tenant particularly in the rural areas in Central Uganda.
It is also observable that since independence the state has been very cautious not to clarify land ownership in the rural areas and particularly in areas outside Buganda. This seems to suggest that the state is interested in promoting an insecure peasantry for purposes of maintaining a good supply of a patrimonial relationship. This is well illustrated in the analysis of the 1998 Land Law and its position on Customary Tenure. With the exception of Buganda (central Uganda) and urban areas, most land in Uganda is held under customary tenure. Article 237(4) of the Constitution empowers all Ugandan citizens owning land under customary tenure to acquire certificates of customary ownership in respect of their land in a manner prescribed by legislation. The Land Act 1998 further restates the constitutional right of the individuals, families or communities owning land under customary tenure to apply for a certificate of customary ownership in respect of their land. 7 The certificate of customary ownership is deemed by the Act to be conclusive evidence of the customary rights and interests endorsed thereon. 8 Subject to any restrictions endorsed on the certificate, generally, a certificate holder – individual or group – has a right to deal with the land just like any other landowner. Thus, one may mortgage, lease or sell the land, except where such right is precluded or restricted by the certificate.
Conversely, the legal recognition of customary land tenure has not essentially translated into a pro-customary land tenure policy. Undeniably, the position is quite the dissimilar. While the 1995 Constitution gives customary landowners a right to convert their title to freehold in accordance with any law enacted by the Parliament, the same institution is silent on the resolve of land owners to transfer their land from freehold to customary. This accentuates the notion that the institutional reform aimed at facilitating the termination of customary land tenure. This evidence is contained in the Constitutional Commission Report of 1992, which advocated conversion of customary tenure into freehold tenure as a progressive move to set the country into greater economic development. 9 The thinking also arouse out of the perception that customary tenure tends to emphasise cultural values more than the economic and financial gains from the land and as a result impedes development. For, land users are not enthused in making long-term investments in the land. Customary land tenure was seen to promote Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968) which has cast a shadow over the tenure of communal property for most of the past 50 years.
Undeniably, Hardin argued that as population increases, unclear ownership of common pool resources will inevitably result in degradation as each user acts in self-interest to maximise their personal benefit. Hence land held under customary land tenure especially for communal use tends to suffer from neglect and consequent degradation. Yet, Quan and Toulmin (2000) seem to discount the Hardin’s claim by confirming that land under customary tenure is often administered and/or protected by extended family linkages, and for the same reason, land is often guaranteed to protection, careful utilisation and restrictions on transfers outside the family and the clan, and the desire to preserve land for the future generation. Customary land tenure is associated with numerous and often strong informal institutional arrangements including customs and taboos. But it is interesting to question, why is there prevalence of informal institutions of customary land tenure in most parts of Uganda? The answer to this question may be located in Bruce’s analysis of institutions of land administration in Africa (Bruce, 1998). He affirms that access to land and security of land rights in Africa is largely governed by strong informal customary institutions of traditional authorities. It is a known fact that informal institutions constrain transparency, agential accountability and rule enforceability in the governance of resources within any state (Helmke & Levitsky, 2006; Schedler, 1999; Toulmin, 2008; Tsai, 2007). In many cases, these underlying informal institutions have played land protective role especially in face of potential land grabbing, especially in northern and eastern Uganda.
Another important feature of institutional power hierarchy relates to the institutions of land management. The 1998 Land Act and the 2010 amendment in pursuance of the overall government policy of decentralisation has over time decentralised land management and dispute settlement mechanisms. The legislation dictated the creation of several new institutions for land management/administration and land dispute resolution. These were designed to shift the focus of land management from the centre to the local level, and provide for effective community involvement in land management decisions. In Uganda, the institutional hierarchy of land management starts with the ULC, which is responsible for any public land and the issues around it. This is followed by the District Land Boards (DLB) which are independent of the ULC, and equally independent from any other government organ or person. They are in charge of all land in the district.
According to Section 56 of the 1998 Land Act, the major role of DLB is to hold and allocate land in the district which is not owned by any person or authority. The is reinforced by Section 57 of the same Act, wherein the Act gives power to the DLB to facilitate the registration and transfer of interests in land, and take over the role and exercise the powers of the lessor in the case of a lease granted by a former controlling authority. The DLBs have been variously viewed as forts of local political patronage and resource appropriation by the ruling party, particularly in the districts of the oil regions in Western Uganda (Albertine region), in the mining areas in Karamoja and in Northern Uganda. It is also reported that members of the District Local Councils exert influence on the DLB especially when offering leases on public lands. In other circumstantiates, there are reports of political and military influence in the execution of the work of the DLB (Akena & Ssemakula, 2020). Like elsewhere in Africa, decentralisation of land governance was framed with the key assumption that doing so would empower local resource users and harness the potential gains and positive attributes of local structures with land management mandates (Camilla & Quan, 2000) This is in addition to reducing the cost involved in land transactions, it was also assumed that decentralising land governance would bring services related to land administration closer to the people (Clarke, 2009). But, in reality, the politics of DLBs reveal that they constitute substantial institutional contradictions, tenure insecurity and fuelling of competition among state and non-state authorities, rather than strengthening local mechanisms for securing tenure (Leeuwen, 2017).
The above paradoxes become so apparent when one closely examines the Zimbabwean condition regarding the security of tenure for resettled farmers, following the outcome of 2000 elections. For instance, if the state was principally concerned about the security of resettled farmers from losing their land to white colonial farmers, then a more logical remedy against that would have been to immediately allocate the resettled farmers with title deeds which would permanently establish their claims to land and be a guarantee against any potential evictions or removals in the event of a new government opposed to the current land policy coming into power. It is clear, therefore, that the tenure policy was anchored in the exigencies of regime survival and ‘territorialising’ the resettlement areas as zones of electoral control and influence. Controlling access to land can be visualised as the only coercive political commodity the ruling party was left with, and it conveniently used it to alter the outcome of elections since 2000 when the party gained the majority of its seats in the rural areas and lost in all the urban constituencies.
By threatening resettled farmers with eviction, violence and intimidation all of which were convenient within the closed and highly politically delimited resettlement zones, the ruling party was able to dominate the opposition in these areas. One villager interviewed by the Zimbabwean Independent Newspaper in Lalapansi shared this deep-seated fear of eviction if they voted for MDC T when he said, ‘the farms are our only source of livelihood….our hearts lie with MDC T but fear of losing our farms if we do not vote for ZANU PF is stalking us’ (The Zimbabwean, 2013). The desire to safeguard their pieces of land has thus played a critical role in influencing the electoral choices that the resettled communities have made ever since 2000. The state has also played upon these fears by circulating claims that if they vote for the opposition, the whites would come back and reclaim their land. Another more pernicious and systematic model of manipulation through access to land is propagated by the state through allowing informal settlements to establish themselves in various categories of state land with the explicit blessings of the ruling party’s authorities. These settlements are exclusively maintained as centres of the state patronage client relationship bordering on access to land rights in exchange for votes. Southgate and Hulme identify a key means in land appropriations to be ‘the capacity of the patron-client chains that link the national elite to the local level…’ (Southgate, & Hulme, 2000).
In the run up to any major election, scores of these settlements are deliberately and methodically allowed to proliferate by the state. The land occupiers in these areas are usually promised to have their stay regularised in the soonest possible time. Meanwhile, these informal settlements become integrated within the ruling party system. To ensure their vulnerability and political malleability, the inhabitants are thus not granted any entitlement to land and are thus squatters. Their grant of permission to stay in designated informal settlements is usually a way of territorialising them to a definite geographic spacing where they are convenient in the structuring of political boundaries and gerrymandering constituencies. After the election, these political territories are usually dismantled and the rights to use and occupy land is withdrawn consequently. After the elections of July 31 which were controversially won by the ruling party, thousands of land occupiers and villagers were evicted by the state from across several parts of the country.
In September 2013, a Kwekwe court gave an eviction order which threw out 70 families from a farm in the Midlands province despite the promises of ‘homes for votes’ (SW Radio, 2013). The evicted families had been living on the farm since 2009 and felt settled only to be thrown out soon after having voted for the ruling party. A spokesperson for the evicted villagers said, ‘We feel used because politicians came here soliciting for our votes and even had a polling station on this farm, but now we are being evicted. We voted for ZANU PF because they made a promise that everyone should have access to land but now, we are being thrown out in the open like animals’ (SW Radio, 2013). Another 300 settlers who had occupied a farm near Masvingo town at the beginning of the year were also evicted soon after the elections. Other scores of ZANU PF supporters from Masvingo province, Mashonaland East and Midlands were also evicted from farms they had occupied in similar circumstances.
Whereas land tenure regimes have been deliberately engineered in the rural areas as a way of creating safety net for the peasants and inadvertently a political safety-net for the ruling party. A similar strategy has also been applied in the peri-urban areas where the state doles out acres of land to landless urban dwellers and then use this a way of political coercion.
The land was given out under very opaque circumstances with no entitlements or title deeds. The settlers were then forced to join housing cooperatives to which they make monetary contributions at the end of every month. These housing cooperatives are used as informal structures of the ruling party for recruitment of members and the broadening of the party’s support base in the urban centres. In the 2008 harmonised elections, the ruling party delimited a new peri-urban constituency which they named Harare South, lying on the border of a commercial farm and the city. The ruling party handed out parcels of land to poor squatters on the edge of the city and within this commercial farming area. Poll experts noted that the Harare South seat was won by ZANU PF on the basis of ‘manipulating poor and homeless residents living in settlements such as Hopley’ (DomanMarket, n.d.).
Another level at which ‘territorialisation’ can be understood involves the individual accumulation plans whereby individuals seek to gain control over parts or all of a farm, to lay claim to the land and by doing so influence the settlers living on it. This scenario is usually carried in A2 farms and involves the use of state’ instruments of enforcing authority and power such as government documents, the courts, police and resources such as input and credit schemes. Within the same territorialising scheme lie the powers of traditional authorities and other local centres of authority in land allocation in the resettlement areas (Rutherford, 2013). Powerful political elites have been able, within the context of rural resettlement, to create their little centres of authority and power by controlling access to key resources such as dams, land and forest resources and to mediate conflict amongst the different land users in the resettlement areas. Allocation of new plots and the subdivision of land to accommodate new settlers is a continuous aspect in most of fast-track resettlement areas and this has accorded traditional leaders and local elites the opportunity to influence the matrix of local relations. Former farm workers living in the A2 farms have most often been vulnerable to this localised ‘territorialisation’ as new settlers demand their labour and loyalty in return for pieces of residential and agricultural land they are offered. In a number of cases, farm workers have been evicted for supporting the opposition. 10
Conflicts also abounded amongst the various land users over claims to land and there were dispossessions of land users, and repossession by new settlers. There have been quite numerous conflicts over land and land resources in the fast-track land resettlement areas and some of these have spilled into the courts. In 2011, there was the case of Vice President Joshua Nkomo vs Langton Masunda for the control of a 611.7 ha safari lodge which resulted in Nkomo’s bodyguard shooting and injuring Masunda’s brother Patrick. In Zvishavane, Chief Wedza and Chief Mafela have fought over the control of Zugaburg Resettlement. In 2014, in the High Court, there was a case of 31 new farmers contesting their eviction from Lion Kopje Farm by Chief Zvimba. The forced takeover of the Save Conservancy by ZANU PF politicians who displaced the local communities and their white partners is another case in point of the escalating conflicts over control of land resources. These nascent conflicts for the control of land resources must be seen as reflecting the deep dynamics of power and control which will continue to shape the Zimbabwean agrarian landscape into the future and the land reform as long as the tenure security vacuum is not addressed.
Rethinking the Role of the State in Land Tenure Relationship: Conclusion
In varied ways, this paper has made it evident that the state continues to advocate victoriously that it has resolved the unfinished post-colonial business with regards to land tenure through by its declaration of the fast-track land reform programs. It is equally clear that the tenure ambiguities, the strong-statist inclined model of land tenure in both countries has exhibited that a manipulative, conflicting and a less-reconciling institutional setting for land property rights, will continue to provide a weak link between state and society in the two contexts. Conceivably it is constructive to reflect on the germane interrogation presented (Munro, 1998) in which he asks the unresolved question of who controls the land in Zimbabwe? Is it the state or people, the individual or community? In more similar ways, Mugambwa (2000) candidly enquires on what the land reformation in Uganda means for citizenship, their agrarian struggles and property rights in Uganda? These two converging inquests point to the supposition that land remains a powerful political tool in the inventory of the post-colonial state’s ammo of power and coercion. In Zimbabwe’s case, the claim that the land reform is not reversible is very farcical considering the precarious and pathetic tenurial security institution which the government has built over the last 33 years where land can easily be appropriated by the state and settlers are so vulnerable to the whims and caprices of any policy shift in government. In comparable ways, it is profoundly clear that both states’ drive for land reform was never to offer power the citizens as sovereigns, but rather to exert control, provide an incessant network of political patronage and oil client relationship and manipulation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
