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LAND barons who parcelled out State land, usually farms adjoining cities that were slated for eventual planned urban settlement, with emphasis on planned development, were bad enough, but we are now seeing creeping encroachment via traditional leaders of rural land, and especially communal land.
There might not be the large-scale illegal allocations we saw with the fake cooperatives and corrupt urban council officials and councillors, but there are a lot more traditional leaders who appear to be involved and the total area being allocated is growing, and partial scattering of the illegal allocations is not hiding what is happening.
Basically, people who have no community right and so zero land rights in a peri-urban area, or in a communal land next to or near an urban area, are making discreet contact with a village head or higher ranking traditional leader, paying out an agreed sum, which is legally a bribe, and then being allocated a “piece of land”, usually hacked out of the grazing area.
They then build a house, wall it off and pretend they are just an ordinary homestead, although without the farming garden.
Then we have perfectly legal residents of a communal land, or for that matter with an offer letter or lease on resettlement land, who make an illegal subdivision or even pretend to sub-lease, and for the “price of a stand” hand over a plot to some urban outsider.
One suspects that the local village head or other traditional leader might have to be squared to overlook the arrival and settlement of an outsider.
We are now being told that factories have even been set up on communal land and general farm land without going through the correct procedures, and which are thus illegal.
These sort of arrangements might be in a grey legal area if the urban person on the communal “piece of land” or on what amounts to a subdivision of a resettlement farm either belongs to the community involved or is a close family member, but these are a tiny minority of the urbanites moving onto farm land. Most have their communal rights far away, not next door to Harare Metropolitan. This is not to say that communal lands and resettlement lands are fixed forever as pure farming areas with legal registered farmers living on each allocation.
There are quite legal ways, starting with the local rural district council, for business centres, the centres of rural industrialisation, the facilities needed on a farm when the farmer moves into on-site processing and even new towns to be planned and established, and for existing such legal centres to be expanded. There are a set of procedures to go through, and in some cases these eventually require the permission of the President when, for example, an area of communal land is excised for urban settlement.
And the last thing the Second Republic wants is to prevent a rural area developing, but does want that development to be both legal and for the prime benefit of the people in the area, not a bunch of outsiders with thick wallets and just wanting an urban stand with zero investment into the community. The result of this illegal land allocation on farm land is to create immense urban sprawl, and usually unplanned urban sprawl.
The last census in 2022 mapped a lot of this, especially around Harare, with both the land barons invading farms provisionally assigned for proper urban development and the sudden surge in densities in what are supposed to be farming areas.
Harare Metropolitan has now burst its limits by a wide margin and we have the position where the de facto urban area is far larger than cities with five times its population in developed countries, largely because of this unplanned urban development with zero services such as sewers and water or grid electricity.
A lot of people take up these illegal urban stands in the hope that everything will one day be regularised.
While the Second Republic has agreed that where possible the mess it inherited will be regularised and title deeds granted, generally most of the land has now been discovered to have been allocated via corrupt councils creating fake cooperatives for the land barons.
President Mnangagwa has made it clear that there was a cut off point for urban land, and that the invasions into communal and farm land are not included. A lot of people risk demolition. To prevent urban sprawl while making sure urban dwellers can have decent places to live, the Second Republic has adopted policies of densification and blocks of flats, which allow densities to rise sharply while still having large family dwellings, just stacked up rather than spread out.
Other solutions are double storey terraced housing and the cluster housing which is transforming the low density suburbs by packing a dozen upmarket houses on a single 4 000 square metre stand.
Proper planning and proper services are required for all new development and redevelopment, and that requires adherence to legal standards.
Warnings have been given to traditional leaders that their powers of land allocation do not include selling off land illegally to outsiders wanting urban plots, and those paying bribes to get these illegal urban plots are equally guilty.
We have now had the Permanent Secretary for Presidential Affairs in the Office of the President and Cabinet, Engineer Tafadzwa Muguti, a very senior civil servant, warning traditional leaders that they can be prosecuted if they exceed their powers of allocation.
They are not immune and the commercial allocation we are now seeing is definitely both illegal and undesirable.
No one denies that there are shortages of urban housing; that is why there is such a strong housing policy with the Government itself and a wide range of legal private developers developing and building new housing.
This would be even faster if the money now going into bribes and payments to land barons was available for the legal and planned development. And the new owners would have title from the beginning so they could actually get financing as well as have solid security rather than some vague hope of regularisation.
Online Reporter