John W. Bruce, Mark S. Freudenberger and Tidiane Ngaido (1995):
Old Wine in New Bottles:

1.1 Replacement reforms

The reform models adopted varied according to the ideological predilections of the new governments. These reforms, called "replacement" reforms because they sought to replace indigenous tenure systems, can be clustered in three groups:

1. state ownership of land with production collectively organized through some combination of state farms and group farming associated with villagization, examples being Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Mozambique;
2. state ownership of land with production on a household basis under leases or permits from the state featuring development conditions, examples of such state leasehold systems being Zambia, Nigeria, Sudan, and Uganda; and
3. creation of individual private ownership, eliminating the community interest in the land, the only major post-independence examples being Kenya and the Lilongwe region in Malawi.

In spite of this diversity, these reforms had some common fundamental assumptions: indigenous systems of tenure needed to be replaced; the nation-state had to replace the local community as the guarantor of access to land and security of tenure; and a uniform national system of tenure should replace the diversity of indigenous systems.

The reforms in the first group are gone, with most of the countries concerned having shifted to the second reform approach. State leasehold systems persist in many countries, but have been implemented on only a very limited scale; the governments concerned lacked the personnel and other resources to take over the vast work of land administration from traditional authorities. Leaseholds were used in development projects and reform sectors, but generally could not be extended to smallholders in the traditional tenure sector.

The experience with leasehold tenure has been marred by its association with "free land" policies, such as the "land without value" concept in Zambia, and the corruption of the allocation process engendered by those policies. A system in which a scarce and valuable good is administratively allocated virtually free provides great opportunities for corruption. Development conditions, which had been one of the justifications for use of leasehold rather than full ownership, were often badly conceived and rigid, and in any case they were rarely effectively monitored. They were sometimes utilized as a pretense for government to take land to punish political dissidents or simply to take valuable land for officials and their associates.

The individual ownership reform model has been judged largely by the Kenyan reform, which has been remarkable for its scope, converting the tenure of virtually all agricultural land to private, individual ownership. The conversion was accomplished through a project of compulsory and systematic demarcation and survey of holdings, adjudication of rights, and registration of titles. Begun in the late colonial period, it was carried forward by the government of independent Kenya. In the years after the reform began, Kenyan smallholder agriculture showed great vitality, but it has been difficult to establish what role the tenure reform had in the rapid commercialization of smallholder production because several other important changes took place at the time, such as removal of restrictions upon black farmers growing coffee. Where the phenomena that are thought to link tenure change to investment and productivity (such as credit access) have been examined, linkages have been difficult to establish.

Side effects of the Kenyan reform have been widely criticized. Individualization had been conceived as an extinction of community controls over land, but by concentrating all rights in a single proprietor, it also cut off the customary rights and protections of family members and others. While there is no evidence that sales have resulted in significant concentration of landownership, they have played a role in the growing landlessness and increased urban migration and left many families without a safety net. While disputes over land declined in the period immediately after the reform, after a decade the number of disputes mushroomed as members of families which had not fully accepted the individualist ethos quarreled with the registered owners. The system relies upon participants to register successions and transactions, but they have very often not done so, undermining a system established at great cost (Shipton 1988).

In addition, there is recent evidence from studies carried out by the Land Tenure Center (LTC) in Senegal, Uganda, Somalia, and Kenya that formal demarcation and titling of smallholders’ land does not produce very significant returns in improved access to credit for those holders or new investments in the land by those holders. In many rural areas of Africa, market forces, infrastructure, and financial markets are so underdeveloped that lack of access to a formal land title appears not to be the constraining factor for these farmers. At the same time, studies by the World Bank have confirmed that community-based tenure systems are not static but tend to evolve toward stronger household and individual rights where those market forces are present. Taken together, these findings suggest that broad replacement strategies need to be reconsidered (Bruce and Migot-Adholla 1994).

The disappointing results of these reforms were becoming clear by the mid-1980s, and research has tried to understand this experience better. In evaluating the reforms, it is often difficult to discriminate between flawed conceptualization and poor implementation as the root of failure, but consistent failure in many places over time tends to point toward conceptualization as the problem. In the case of the collectivization reforms, the experience in Africa has been consistent with poor performance under those models around the world, and they have disappeared from the reform agenda. In the case of the individualization reforms, both those which offer full ownership and those which offered only a leasehold from the state, it seems that tenure had been miscast as the bottleneck, with tenure reform as the "silver bullet." Tenure reform proved ineffective when rushed ahead of the development of access to commodity markets and to formal credit, and it is clear that future programs must treat tenure reform as an integrated part of rural development.