MANYARA, TANZANIA — As you trek down a rocky terrain dotted with thorny shrubs, that form a rosette of gray-green leaves with sharp spines on the tips, you can have a rare glimpse of ancient bushmen preying on antelopes and collect wild fruits.
The Hadzabe
One of Africa’s remaining hunters-gatherers whose way of life is increasingly threatened by modernity live in a tangled jungle stretching on a wide expanse of land.
Armed with rudimentary bows and arrows, the Hadzabe, who live at Yaeda valley in Tanzania’s northern Manyara region, still live by hunting and gathering.
Equipped with a vast knowledge of plants and animals, the tribesmen have for years lived in harmony.
However, due to increasing human activities, their idyllic balance with nature is rapidly waning—thus forcing them to struggle to eke out a living.
Across Africa, developing countries are increasingly perceived as potential areas for large scale agricultural investments. Foreign companies often, take advantage of legal loopholes to take swathes of village land for investment purposes.
As one of the developing countries, Tanzania has as such, attracted huge interest among foreign firms. In some cases, companies directly negotiate with village leaders to take collectively-owned land.
However, with the help from local charities and respective district authorities, indigenous groups and marginalized farming communities are now using innovative approaches to secure their land.
From Manyara in the north to Pawaga in the south to Kiteto in the east, indigenous communities, whose rights have for long been trampled on by powerful encroachers are being assisted to develop land-use planning and village by-laws to protect their land.
Through lobbying, advocacy, and participatory land-use planning, Ujamaa Community Resources Team (UCRT) — a local advocacy group, seeking to empower and uphold communities’ land rights, has secured 20,000 hectares of land for the Hadzabe.
“We have developed a land-use plan, and village by-laws with the aim to protect their way of life,” says Edward Loure, a land rights activist and founder of UCRT.
The advocacy group is working to map and secure 970,000 hectares of communal land in northern Tanzania to deter grabbers.
While local communities and indigenous people collectively control more than half of the world’s land, they own about 10 percent legally, and less of it is registered and titled according to a study published in 2018 by World Resources Institute.
In Sub-Sahara Africa, the challenge is more pronounced as ethnic groups such as the Maasai, known for their distinctive nomadic lifestyle, are particularly vulnerable to land grabbing.
In the Longido district in the northern Arusha region, UCRT has also secured a huge chunk of communal land for the Maasai, recognized by their distended earlobes, colorful beads, and dazzling red shawls. They have been issued with a document called Customary Rights of Occupancy.
“This is a very important document, it recognize them as the rightful owners of the land,” says Loure.
According to him, the move has helped to ease recurring conflicts with rival groups.
Back in Yaeda, although the Hadzabe are resilient and quick to adapt to new situation, their livelihood is facing multiple challenges as their hunting grounds are being encroached on by powerful outsiders.
“I am very happy because we have a strong protection of our land,” says Loreiy Juma, a bushman.
As people, companies, and governments are jostling for natural resources, the customary tenure agreements that used to protect rural land rights are often being undermined, and communities across Tanzania are losing swathes of unregistered land to foreign firms, land rights campaigners say.
At Vilabwa village, Kisarawe district in Tanzania’s coast region local residents who use collectively-owned land for farming, woke up to a grim reality as corrupt village leaders in 2014, allegedly tried to allocate 1,500 hectares of the village land to YellowBiofuel, a Mauritius based company, that had expressed interest to grow energy crops.
As she cleared grass on her field to prepare for sowing, 58-year-old Hidaya Bulembo recalls six years ago, when, she saw some people erecting concrete slabs on the edge of her farm without consulting the villagers.
“I knew something fishy going on. When I alerted other villagers we knew that a portion of our village land was about to be grabbed by the investor without following due process,” she says.
Instead, the villagers went to Vilabwa’s Village Land and Adjudication Committee (VLAC), a local body that helps landowners demarcate their boundaries and mediates land conflicts.
Armed with relevant information, the villagers registered their land with the government. The deal flopped and they fully regained it. But a growing number of communities are taking a stand and formalizing their land rights.
“When the village land is documented, it brings a sense of security,” said Ali Khamis Mnyaa, chairman of the Vilabwa VLAC.
SKIRTING THE LAW
Although 80 percent of Tanzania’s population work in agriculture, only a quarter of the country’s 44 million hectares of arable land are being used, according to government figures.
All land in Tanzania is the property of the state. Under the Land Act, which covers about 30 percent of the land in the country, the government can grant someone the right to occupy a piece of land for up to 99 years.
The rest of Tanzania’s land falls under the Village Land Act, which recognizes customary tenure and allows communities to allocate and use land in accordance with tradition. Any transfer of land rights under customary tenure requires the approval of the entire community.
Companies looking to buy land in the country are required by law to go through the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC), an independent government agency.
In order to protect communities’ rights, even the transfer of village land must be approved by the government and the process has to involve all members of the village, said Geoffrey Mwambe, TIC Executive Director.
But land rights advocates say companies often try to skirt the law, bypassing the TIC and colluding with local village leaders directly.
Vilabwa residents say when YellowBiofuel first failed to get hold of the land it wanted, company officials tried to convince village leaders to sell to them by promising to build new schools and health clinics.
While village leaders generally welcome investors and the potential benefits they bring including jobs, improved infrastructure, and investments in health and education systems, companies often fail to deliver once the sale is agreed, said Emmanuel Sulle from the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, a research institute in South Africa.
“Evidence indicates that during the implementation of large-scale investments, the rights of rural communities over land and natural resources are not respected,” he said.
YellowBiofuel did not respond to email sent to them.
COMPLEX AND CORRUPT
In its 2018 report titled ‘The Scramble for Land Rights,’ the World Resources Institute noted that as demand for food, fuel, and other natural resources grows, there is increasing competition for land.
Communities are rushing to secure legal documentation of their land rights before companies take it from under them, the report said.
But the land registration process in Tanzania is often cumbersome and often riddled with corruption and inefficiency according to Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer.
Although rural communities including farmers and pastoralists have for decades used swathes of land for growing crops and for keeping animals, most do not have any documented evidence to prove it belongs to them.
Without enough tenure or security, farmers are not only less likely to invest in their land but also become vulnerable to powerful outsiders who are believed to collude with corrupt village leaders to seize property.
To help them navigate the system, rural communities are teaming up with non-profit organizations focused on promoting rural land rights. Together, they mark out village and farm boundaries and formalize land-planning use. They use that information to apply for CCROs which, if granted, gives the villagers formal powers over the use of their land.
For Bulembo, the farmer in Vilabwa, the biggest benefit of getting one of those certificates is finally feeling that her land and her livelihood are safe.
“I feel confident because I know, going forward, nobody will ever try to take part of this land for his own selfish interests,” she said.
Lack of official documentation that proves ownership means that the rights of these indigenous people are oftentimes trampled on. Today indigenous groups have lost more than 150,000 hectares of rangelands in northern parts of Tanzania. As supply of available land in Tanzania dwindles, huge pressure is being exerted on areas controlled by the Maasai and the Hadzabe, thus triggering recurring conflicts with outsiders.
With a special dispensation in Tanzania’s Village Land Act of 1999, indigenous groups are actively being supported by local NGOs to have their community land rights recognized.
The NGOs including UCRT, have been actively involved in mapping the boundaries of communally-owned land and drawing up land-use planning.
Although the country’s laws governing land acquisition indicate that companies should obtain land through Tanzania Investment Center (TIC) — a government agency tasked with investment promotions, local land experts say, there were cases where private companies negotiated directly with village leaders and finance village land use planning processes.
In cases where land transfers are facilitated by TIC, observers say the government often use archaic compensation standards, where original users, whose land appears to be within identified investment areas are unable to negotiate compensation offers.
While village leaders often welcome investors who come with mouth-watering promises such as providing employment, build infrastructures, health, education, and support for community projects, investors allegedly do not always fulfill such promises.
Considerable discrepancies between the national policy on local land use planning and the situation on the ground, create ambiguities that are prone to exploitation.
Sule said although Tanzania government backs the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, it has not yet sufficiently recognized and protected those rights in the country.
According to him, the resource rights, including land, of the indigenous people are at risk from incursions from farmers, herders due to surging demand for land entangled by historical and contemporary large-scale alienations for economic development, biodiversity conservation and the changing climate.
Despite those policy huddles, Sulle said the government, through the Ministry of Land and Human Settlements Development has expressed great interest in working with local non-governmental organization to secure the land belonging to indigenous groups.
LAND REGISTRATION
Local villagers and poor individuals often shoulder a huge burden when trying to obtain various documents and approvals in order to secure a certificate of village land and customary right of occupancy respectively.
“The process often stretches the limited resources allocated to districts, which have large backlogs of pending land applications,” Sulle stressed.
Determining village boundaries in resource-rich communities with valuable forests and other natural resources is often a recipe for disputes between villages with conflicting or inconsistent oral histories and customary land boundary markers requiring resolution.
“These disputes can be challenging to resolve because they require significant time and monetary investments,” he said.
Such disputes often cause major delays for respective authorities to attempting to confirm survey maps from villages, thus further delay the formalization process.
In many cases villages or individuals use their limited funds to follow up and pay for the necessary costs to speed up their land formalization process.
“Communities have either received little compensation for their land allocated to investors most of them have either left such lands undeveloped or sold to new investors, and or have failed to fulfill their promises such as job creation and provision of social services most of which are unwritten,” Sulle said.
While formalization of the village land is key for securing community land, experts say it can expose communities to a complex set of dynamics including external agendas by powerful actors including the state, NGO’s and investors.
For example, in places where village lands are formalized to facilitate natural resources, such as establishing wildlife management area or large scale investment in agriculture, the interests of powerful actors are often prioritized against those of the local communities.
