EDITORIAL COMMENT: Title deeds move will lock out barons

THE decision by Presi­dent Mnangagwa to cut through the Gordian knot that had created an impossible predicament for the unregistered owners of stands in many urban areas, but particularly Harare, was needed to exclude the land barons and corrupt city officials and to prevent any further expan­sion of that criminal activity.

There are still a lot of details that need to be worked out, obviously, but the Government policy has been very clear with three strands when it comes to fixing the land mess, particularly in Harare south where the land barons rode roughshod over every planning law.

The first group of residents are those on properly laid out stands that were grabbed and sold by the land barons. These can simply be given title deeds for what they have now as there are no extra planning issues to resolve.

What is needed is a process of regularisation, which will include areas such as piped water supply, the Zesa trunking, the proper make-up of the road grid and connection to sewers, although on those sandy soils septic tanks are adequate for the time being.

Residents may well have to contribute to this although civil action against the barons should provide a good slice of the needed cash, so long as the barons did not spend everything.

But the problem that residents were facing was that to get the security of a title deed, and this is needed if they wish to borrow money for home improvements or their share of common ser­vices, the barons were demand­ing another round of payments and bribes.

And by this stage of the process the residents were not willing to throw in extra money with the zero guarantees and corruption offered by the barons.

The second strand in the gen­eral clean-up policy involves those who were allocated stands on informal or illegal layouts, and paid large sums for stands in the belief that everything was aboveboard.

A good chunk of those stands can probably be regularised and town plans drawn up that incorporate them, so creating the stands and stand numbers that can be used on a title deed.

There will be extra additional work, more than required for the first group of stand buyers, but basically the two groups will end up the same.

And with the deeds will have the security that will make their investment into their homes and into whatever services they have to pay for worthwhile.

The third group are the trick­iest. They were “sold” stands that cannot exist since they are on wetlands or on land reserved for schools, recreation or the like.

Here the Government has said it will, after checking out the buyers to make sure they are genuine home-buyers who were just conned by criminals, find alternative land and lay out the needed stands.

Here again these people, who have paid it must be remembered, will need their title deeds. That process needs to be accelerated.

In the end those who fell victim to the barons will have security of tenure, essential if you invest your savings into a home, and fair since the barons often were backed by officials, and were usually selling stands or land allocated to co-operatives that were then sold for private profit.

They encouraged sales and encouraged building on the basis that they could regularise the stands and the houses, for an additional charge. Well President Mnangagwa has short circuited that additional criminal process.

There are taxes to be paid when a title deed is granted or trans­ferred, largely cost recovery in the deeds office, but these are not dramatic and most people will be glad to pay them for the proper deeds.

There are some safeguards that need to be put into place, promptly. The whole clean up is designed to deal with those who are already there.

It will be difficult and need a lot of work, with problems already known.

Some barons sold the same stand several times and it will be necessary to work out who is the real owner, for example.

But we do not need the barons suddenly expanding operations and seizing more State or council land and selling it off, telling peo­ple that the “President will fix it”.

There is enough chaos to clean up without adding to the mess, and while councils are sup­posed to be watching for these sort of problems past experience strongly suggests that central Government will need to keep a sharp eye open and move swiftly when some criminal decides to invade land with a box of pegs and a bag to collect the cash.

The Government has a rational and serious housing programme, largely using its own land, but also including the private sector, to end Zimbabwe’s drastic short­age of decent housing.

Obviously all new housing development needs to be incor­porated into this programme or into the approved and planned private schemes that will com­plement it.

This means the land bar­ons and the criminals must be excluded totally.

If someone buys a stand let them buy it from the Govern­ment, with the title deed in exist­ence before the stand is sold and available to the buyer or being held by a proper registered finan­cial institution that has granted a mortgage on the security of the deed.

Creating the title deeds after the stand has been sold and the house built is a short-term emer­gency programme that is abso­lutely necessary to lock out the criminals and near criminals who ran riot for a couple of decades before the Second Republic, and then legalise the house owners who were conned.

But future land deals can all be legal, above board and the money paid going to whoever has put in the services as we resume the normal systems of urban devel­opment with the Government driving the process.