Tag: politics

The Elections are Coming Up

The presidential elections are coming up this weekend in Tanzania. Everyone was expecting it to be fairly peaceful, but now there are rumours that there might be some conflicts on Sunday.

The ruling party, called the CCM, has been in power ever since independence. Although no one expects the presidential position to be won by other parties, most people would tell me that there would be a shift towards more MPs from other parties. People are tired of the CCM. People want change and here was a one-in-five year chance for change. Currently about 70% of MPs are from the CCM. The oppositional parties are numerous but weak while divided. Some say that if only the opposition would unite, there would be a chance to kick CCM off the majority, but who knows?

Incidents that I’ve heard about the elections:

The CCM has employed a “security force” of something like 100 horses and 200 dogs (with people of course). And maybe they’ve employed many unemployed youth to make trouble. Hence the prediction that Sunday might result in some conflict.

The University of Dar es Salaam has been closed until the elections are over. Here, you can’t vote outside of the place you registered. So if you registered at the university because you were living there, you can’t vote at your home village. The problem with closing the university is that the students can’t go and live in the dorms. That makes voting difficult, because they would have to travel all the way from their home town/village to vote and then go back. Travelling is expensive for many. Plus, the student loans are dispensed until after the elections, so no money to travel. Oh yes, and it so happens that most of the academic community doesn’t want to vote CCM. Deliberate sabotage? Well maybe. I was talking to a professor on the long distance bus the other day and he said that just as many students have registered in their home villages/towns instead of the university. So if they open the university, just as many people won’t be able to vote. So who knows?

My roommate interviews lots of the urban farmers. One group in particular is really near my office and their leaders are really nice. They were all decked out in CCM gear and handing out CCM pamphlets the other day. So my roommate asked them. “Why do you still support CCM when they’re the party that won’t give you secure land tenure?” The answer surprised me: “If we don’t show our support now (or we show support to an oppositional party), once the CCM wins (and they will, at least for the presidential position), they would marginalize us even more.” I guess, growing up in a very privileged society, I had never thought about repercussions for my stances on politics. So much to consider here. But when my roommate asked Mama Maria who she’ll be voting yesterday, Mama Maria just smiled and said “who I’ll be voting will be in my heart.”

I recently travelled back (for 1.5 days…) to my “home” village, i.e., the village I stayed at last year in the Uluguru Mountains. I was so happy to be back there I almost didn’t want to leave. But that’s a whole other post by itself. Anyways, the whole village was wrapped up in election fever, as with everywhere else I assume. Interestingly, most people I was talking to wanted the opposition party to win, and they were openly supporting the Chadema (there are only two candidates for Ward councillor – one from CCM and one from Chadema). I know the CCM ward councillor, she’s been in power for a long time and she’s not the most pleasant and helpful person. I interviewed her and tried to get her support for the dairy goat project for orphans. It is rumoured that because she didn’t like the project coordinator, she was using her political power to stall the project progress. Anyways, so I was told that even though in reality Chadema is a really small party, most CCM members in the ward would vote for Chadema just because they want to oust the current ward councillor. Everyone is hoping once the other one gets elected, things would at least change. I was very surprised, because last year, when they had their village council elections, it was definitely CCM that had the upper hand. Maybe change is coming. Last week, when I saw the CCM ward councillor again at her shop, she looked really worried. And my translator told me that the other elderly people standing in front of her shop when we arrived were talking about politics, most likely strategies to help her win.

I see many cars with EU Delegation Elections Committee, or something like that, around these days. I guess these are the observers from the EU. It’s my first time seeing anything like this so it’s interesting.

In normal conversation though, people speak very openly about politics, even if they don’t support CCM. The newspapers don’t really criticize the CCM outright, but you can see negative news about them. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a completely “free and fair” election, but it’s not completely set-up either.

Urban Agriculture Farmers Training Week

I’ve been super busy lately. The process of legitimizing urban agriculture (which I’ve talked about before) is coming along well – very surprisingly to me.

We recently had a bit of a milestone. We’ve been planning for a training week for urban agriculture farmers because due to their insecure land tenures, we can’t fund what they want the most – a borehole for clean water. So we asked them what are the second best things you want? And it turns out they wanted training in entrepreneurship, marketing, and environmentally good practices (e.g. making “natural” (non-industrial; cheaper) pesticides, making compost, methods of soil conservation etc). So we got together the 6 groups of farmers we mainly work with and funded and organized a training week. In additional to the training in skills, we hoped that the farmers would be able to network (it’s the first time they’ve all been in the same room) and share their challenges and successes.

Most importantly, we wanted this training week to be part of the process for demarcating land for urban agriculture in which we’re pushing for more participation from the farmers. On the last day, we became a bit more political. We invited all the big shots, some supportive of farming in the city and some not.  As far as I know, it’s really been the first time when all these stakeholders (many government officials and farmers) have been together in a forum where they can really have a discussion back and forth.

My PhD roommate set the tone for the day by giving a presentation about urban agriculture around the world (in Swahili! Super impressive). The main goal being to persuade the big wigs that UA isn’t actually backward or (god-forbid) undeveloped. That it has its practical and social uses. (I can’t wait to see the thesis my roommate will write – she does the most interesting research that yields the most interesting answers. And she’ll hate this sentence because she hates the vague word of ‘interesting’). Lots of good feedback on this one.

Then we had a high level representative from the Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Human Settlement Development (the MLHHSD). The MLHHSD is actually supportive of UA. There is a national law, mainly a legacy of kilimo kwanza (farming first – national goal by the first president, the highly respected Mr. Nyerere), that legalizes urban agriculture. The municipalities are supposed to implement this law by providing assistance to farmers in the city. There is a reason why they hired agriculture agents for all three municipalities of the biggest city – Dar es Salaam. Question period came and the room lit up with tension. Nobody from either the farmers or the municipalities knew about this law. Farmers were delighted and appalled in equal measure. Municipality representatives didn’t know what to say when questioned why they hadn’t done anything to execute this law? Why were they doing the exact opposite by forcing farmers off their land? My supervisor did a great job in calming everyone down. It was more important at that point than to get answers.

Then the farmers presented their concerns and proposed actions. We had asked the farmers early on to discuss with their groups and then write down a list so they can take full opportunity of the chance. During the training, the farmers self-organized and suggested that it would be better if the six groups worked together as one to present. They willingly stayed behind to talk to each other and summarised what they wanted to say. I was so happy to see that. Political activism isn’t what I’m normally used to here. People just don’t go on protests, punching their fists in the air. The farmers must have really understood how important this chance was. Unfortunately, this period seemed a bit short (although it was scheduled for longer), but since I can’t understand Swahili, I can’t be sure. I think it just somehow melted into the next section. Either way, I think the farmers at least got some responses from these normally unreachable government representatives.

Finally, we were supposed to discuss which parcels of land should be earmarked for urban agriculture. We had asked each municipal Agriculture and Livestock office to bring a map marked with areas that they think should be submitted as UA land. Unfortunately, none of the offices did this (which I 99% expected). So instead, the representatives just presented what their departments are doing. On the positive side, it was good because then the farmers got more time to ask questions.

They day was pretty long and intense at times. Especially when one of the farmers got up and made a 15 minute impassioned speech. He was talking about their hardships as farmers and as the ones that are always blamed and moved around. Of course, I couldn’t really understand any of it, I only got the summarised translated version later. The representatives couldn’t really do much either because they’re working in the government which changes slowly. Even if they personally supported UA, their departments might not.

Either way, this day was definitely a very good milestone. I think we’ve changed a few minds and won a few allies. Now comes the next step!

Work isn’t really work

It’s 2:40 am. A rooster is crowing outside my window. Who in the world thought about domesticating these birds?

Now that I’m up and unable to fall back into slumber, I might as well give you an update.

Work has been pretty crazy the last two days. But I’m really starting to see how I fit into the whole picture of SC’s work here; especially my role and involvement in the legitimisation of urban agriculture part.

Let me explain that.

Almost none of the farmers in the city (which there are A LOT, something like 40% of the city population is involved with urban agriculture in some form or another. But then, there isn’t really even an accurate number of how many people live in the city. Officially, there are 4 million inhabitants, but guesses can go up to 10 million. Dar es Salaam is *the* major city migrant workers go to; everyone comes here to try to “make it.” The number of unplanned settlements (new trendy word for slums) makes it hard to actually do a census. – phew, that was a long aside…sorry) have secure land tenure, meaning they farm on land that is not legally theirs. They could have asked for permission from the land owner, whether it is private land or the local government, but usually they do not have a formal contract for long term use. Hence, if the owners decide, they could be very quickly evicted.

As you can imagine, this insecure land tenure issue can bring about a ton of problems. Uncertainty (and it’s scary because this is your whole livelihood) for one, but also inability to invest in the land. For example, many of the farmers would like to irrigate with clean water (who wouldn’t?) but they can’t get any funding or help to install wells or boreholes because no one would fund a project that can be taken over by the land owners any day.

In fact, almost all of the complaints that the farmers have can be related back to the fact that they don’t have any ownership whatsoever over the land they farm.

So that brings us to why I do my work here.

In the short term, we’re trying to help these farmers with the issues we can currently address. Mainly, it’s about building their capacities, which is development jargon for training them in some skills or encouraging them to be confident in applying their skills (“empowering”). For example, right now we’re organizing a training week that includes workshops in marketing, entrepreneurship, and environmentally good practices (“agronomy” – for some reason, this is what they call it here). These are the top issues the farmers identified and we’re trying to help. We actually just had a very fruitful meeting with the trainers and farmer representatives yesterday. Very happy.

But the main reason I was happy about the meeting yesterday isn’t all because it seemed like the farmers are interested in the training. It’s because this training is the first step in getting towards our long term goal.

Eventually, one day, we hope to get urban agriculture land to become a legitimate land use in urban areas. In cities, land use planning involves “zones,” where places are left aside for residential housing, commercial activity, green space, public institutions etc. We want urban agriculture to become one of those zones. The problem with this in Dar es Salaam (and actually many places) is that city planners often fail to see why agriculture should be zoned in the city. There is still very much (as with most places in the world) a view that agriculture is completely a rural activity. (If you’re thinking, well, duh, of course farming is a rural activity, then I will have to explain in another post).

Which, you know, simply means that they are dismissing 40% of the city population’s livelihoods as irrelevant. Even if you don’t agree agriculture should be done in cities, shouldn’t the planning of cities be for the benefits of the inhabitants?

So on the last day of this training week, we are going to get a bit political (which is always interesting). We’re trying to bring together the head planners of each municipality (there are 3), heads of the municipal agriculture offices, representative from the national Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Human Settlement, and representatives from farmers groups. We’re trying to get a discussion going and give an opportunity for the farmers to directly converse with these government officials, who, frankly, don’t listen enough. Hopefully, we’ll also get a rough draft of maps of where areas of urban agriculture should be zoned.

I was very happy with the meeting yesterday because it seemed like we got our point across to the farmers that this last training day is going to be very important. Be prepared for it. Discuss with your groups and write down what your main concerns are. Maybe even draw a map of what you think should be zoned as urban agriculture land. Make sure you think about the bigger picture of urban agriculture in Dar es Salaam rather than just the group you farm with.

In a nutshell, minus all the political and human dynamics, that’s my job. In development jargon, it’s called “engaging stakeholders.”

Do you see why I enjoy my job? :)

Oh wow, the rooster stopped crowing. Maybe I can get a few more hours of sleep…

Categories
agriculture

The politics and economics behind urban agriculture (specifically land tenure and zoning issues) are so complicated that it’s getting me really excited. Well, it actually makes my job a bit harder, but then if it was an easy issue to be solved, it would have been solved already.

One day, when I learn a little bit more, I will write a post about these complicated dynamics between individuals, organizations, and the physical environment.

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