In the aftermath of the post-election crisis, the issue of land has gained increased urgency. Land reforms represent a central part of Kenya’s reform agenda and indeed, the national reconciliation agenda as negotiated by President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga under the aegis of Kofi Annan in early 2008.
The recognition by the Constitution that all land belongs to the people of Kenya and that such land can be held by the people as communities has sought to correct a historical fallacy that has existed in Kenya since the start of the colonial period. The Colonial Government, introduced laws and policies whose effect was to disregard communal approaches to land ownership and use and instead prefer private land tenure arrangements. The justification for this approach was both juridical and economic.
On 27th August 2010, Kenya’s new constitution was promulgated. This set in place a process of implementation through the enactment of different legislations and setting up of new institutional frameworks as envisaged in the new constitutional dispensation. For the land sector, far reaching legal and institutional reforms are envisaged in Chapter 5 of the constitution. The Chapter on Land and Environment also lays out broad principles through which land and the environment shall be managed.
The land question in Kenya has never been solved. Land is a pertinent source of livelihood, the problem has persisted and in a number of years caused chaos as people grow impatient. Over time, there have been complaints from various communities and recently, the past governments have sought to listen the ailing communities. The National Land Policy and the National Land Commission characterize efforts to remedy the continued situation bedeviling the African communities.
The land question in Kenya has never been solved. Land is a pertinent source of livelihood, the problem has persisted and in a number of years caused chaos as people grow impatient. Over time, there have been complaints from various communities and recently, the past governments have sought to listen the ailing communities. The National Land Policy and the National Land Commission characterize efforts to remedy the continued situation bedeviling the African communities.
There is today a growing awareness of the importance of providing rural populations with more secure tenure to land and other natural resources, not least in Africa where approximately 90 percent of all land is still unregistered. At the same time there has been a rethinking of approaches for securing local tenure rights in practice. Experience has shown that the conventional approach, i.e., individual freehold titling, has often not worked well in areas where communal forms of customary tenure predominate, which is still the case in most parts of rural sub-Saharan Africa.
The webinar on the Land Reform Agenda for Kenya took place on 10 October, 2018. The webinar reviewed the land reform process in Kenya and addressed a range of challenges, with a view to defining a path forward that will lead to equity and justice in land reforms.
The webinar addressed the following questions:
Land policy in Ethiopia has been controversial since the fall of the Derg in 1991. While the current Ethiopian government has implemented a land policy that is based on state ownership of land, many agricultural economists and international donor agencies have propagated some form of privatised land ownership. Traces the antagonistic arguments of the two schools of thought how their antagonistic principles of fairness vs. efficiency are played out and have trickled down in the formulation of the federal and regional land policies especially on the new Oromia regional land policy.
Includes Mozambique – war, land and poverty; land law, investors and peasants; land concessions – forests, agrofuels and other crops; are reckless land investment deals over? Traces the history of previous land concessions. A current intense debate on the proper balance between small and large-scale, foreign and domestic investment, food and other crops. Civil society and peasant organizations have successfully exposed many failures relating to recent land investments and are now working to register community lands.
Details the development of contemporary land rights policy and poverty alleviation planning in Mozambique, lessons learned from recent experiences of land reform in Zambezia Province, challenges and strategic options for future support for land reform. Argues that the land reform programme has now reached a critical stage with senior officials believing that measures in the 1997 Land Law designed to protect community tenure are obstacles to investment, and growing support for unfettered privatisation of land rights which would mainly benefit speculators.
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