Botswana has one of the most progressive and successful land policies in Southern Africa. Part of the reason for this is that upon independence Botswana did not inherit the same kinds of problems that South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia did — notably, the massive land ownership inequalities that were a result of the dispossession of African populations by European settlers.
However, the success of Botswana’s land policy also stems from its innovative features and its decidedly pro-poor bearing. The latter is nowhere more obvious than in the official principle that every Batswana has a right to land for residential and agricultural purposes. Within customary tenure areas, which comprise 79% of all land and are controlled through a decentralised system of locally elected land boards, land is allocated free.
This is not to say that Botswana has no land problems. Indeed it does, and they are becoming more acute. In 1991 the government of Botswana appointed the presidential commission into land problems in Mogoditshane and other peri-urban areas. Mogoditshane is the largest peri-urban settlement around Gaborone, by far the largest city in Botswana. The purpose of the commission was to try to identify the causes of the growing squatter problem in the vicinity of Gaborone and other cities and to recommend a course of action to resolve the problem.
The commission found two processes at work. On the one hand, the drift of people out of the agricultural sector was contributing to rapid rural-to-urban migration. On the other hand, the government’s various administrative systems were not able to keep pace with the demand for urban and peri-urban plots, not to mention housing.
Whatever the extent of the problem was in the early 1990s when the commission started its work, it is more serious today. Over the past 10 years the population of Gaborone proper has increased by 39%, while the population of the peri-urban areas surrounding Gaborone has increased by a phenomenal 90%. About one-third of the population of greater Gaborone resides in the peri-urban fringe.
Despite the abundance of land in the country as a whole, land scarcity has emerged in those areas where people believe there are job prospects, particularly in and around Gaborone. Consequently, in contradiction to the policy of free land allocations in communal areas, a market has developed for land in those areas that abut city boundaries. It is largely an illegal market.
A typical illegal transaction is where a person holding an agricultural plot in the peri-urban fringe divides it up and sells the sub-divisions for residential purposes. By law land-holders in customary areas do not own the land, but rather hold it in terms of customary rights. These rights can be transferred from one person to another, but in principle all that can be sold are the developments on the land and not the land itself.
The land, after all, is the common heritage of all Batswana, which is why it is allocated free in the first place. However, those holding agricultural plots in the peri-urban fringe increasingly recognise the market value of the land because of its location, and prefer to sell it illegally to those in need of residential sites rather than accept the relatively meagre compensation offered by the land boards. They are assisted in this by a growing number of estate agents who each month openly advertise plots for sale in Mogoditshane and other peri-urban villages. What is evidenced by the evolution of these land markets is not only a clash of principles — between government-administered allocation and control on the one hand, and open-market allocation on the other — but also a shift in people’s thinking about what it means to “own” land.
The government is unhappy with the pattern of settlement being established by these illegal sales. Indeed, there are causes for concern. Haphazard settlement complicates the provision of services, for example, electricity, water and sewerage. Also, haphazard settlement may not be optimally spaced. Towards the late 1990s attention became focused on about 5000 “illegal squatter” households in Mogoditshane, principally people who had moved on to what had been formally designated agricultural land. According to government officials, the space occupied by these 5 000 households would have been sufficient to accommodate 20 000 to 25 000 households had it been settled according to a rational plan.
However, according to research conducted by the Botswana Council of Non-Governmental Organisations (Bocongo) and the Botswana Christian Council, most of these households have pending applications for land with the local land board, and most of these were submitted years ago. It must also be pointed out that these 5 000 households represent between a third and half of all of the households in Mogoditshane, and about 6% of all households in the greater Gaborone area.
Last year the government commenced with demolitions of the homes of these squatters. So far about half of the 5000 squatters’ homes have been demolished. There has been widespread criticism of the government, not only for the sometimes callous and arbitrary manner in which the demolitions have been undertaken, but for the inadequacies of the land allocation system that contributed to the squatter problem in the first place. Under the umbrella of Bocongo and the Forum on Sustainable Agriculture, funded by the Southern African Regional Poverty Network, a symposium was held recently in Gaborone to discuss the demolitions and to improve the dialogue between civil society and the government in respect of land policy.
In fact, there was a surprising amount of common ground: it is important to maintain the rule of law; it is necessary to create mechanisms to better accommodate low-income households needing access to land for residential purposes close to urban areas; and to the extent squatters exist already, they will probably have to be removed, albeit in a humane way. What was far less clear was exactly how the country’s land policy should be amended in order to manage land pressures more successfully. In particular, no way forward was identified to resolve the clash of principles, that is between government control over allocation on the one hand and market forces on the other.
In comparison with South Africa, the scale of Botswana’s peri-urban land problems are small, almost minute. But apart from scale, and some important aspects of tenure systems, the problems are much the same. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Bredell land invasion on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa has yet to resolve its own version of these issues.
Richard Humphries is coordinator of the Southern African Regional Poverty Network, hosted by the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria