Land frustrations

Land tenure in this city is just so messed up. Coming from two places where privatised individual ownership of land is the norm, it’s really, really hard for me to get my head wrapped around how badly the land reform was done in Dar es Salaam.

The fact that the urban farmers I work with don’t actually farm on legal land is old news. But I recently heard that the ferry terminal downtown is going to be teared down, because the terminal owner doesn’t actually own the land!

Can you imagine? Pour money into building a huge ferry terminal, just never bothered to make sure you owned the land that it’s going to be built on.

The land actually belongs to the Tanzanian Port Authority (TPA). And now the authority wants it back to build their new office complex.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. I’m sure the story is more complex than that. It’s probably because the TPA didn’t want to sell the land, then the terminal building people paid someone in some high place, then they got the rights to build. But in the end, the land never officially changed hands, so now the TPA can come back to demand the land. Corruption seems to always crop up in stories of land. In fact, I heard that 95% of the planning department staff of one of the Municipalities in Dar got fired due to corruption charges. 95%. Blows your mind, doesn’t it?

I don’t think it’s possible to develop this city any further without a serious and coordinated attempt (with teeth) to formalize land tenure. If you want to work on a capitalist economic model, private ownership of land is one of the first things you need to get right!

According to this article:

“The success of the land reform is often mentioned among the factors which laid the groundwork for the “economic miracle” of the 1960s and 1970s, a nearly unprecedented transformation of once rural and impoverished Korea into a modern and developed nation.”

The thing is, there is so much corruption and not enough checks on people in power (i.e. whatever people in power say gets done, no opposition, no consideration of what feasibility studies say is the best to do) that without a strong political will from the high leadership, a good land reform would never happen.

I’m starting to doubt if making Master Plans actually have any effect at all. What’s the use when people high up can just simply say “no” after the whole process?