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

5. Tanzania: Rethinking village tenure

5.1 Tenure reform in Tanzania

As Tanzania moves away from its distinctive style of African socialism, the state is reformulating its land policies. In the Tanzanian case, tenure reform is "reforming the reform," that is, finding viable solutions for the vast legal confusion created by dramatic land tenure reforms since independence. Tanzania has had less a land policy than a series of far-reaching state "operations" under which the government has tried to address agricultural production, and equitable distribution of production opportunities under its former socialist ideals.

A legal baseline has been provided by the Land Ordinance of 1923, still in effect today. It provided that:

• all land was publicly owned and was under the control of the state;
• land rights and land use were based on titles given by the state;
• commoditization of land and land speculation were proscribed; and
• rights of occupancy were as follows: granted rights of occupancy, subject to development conditions for up to 99 years, or deemed rights of occupancy based on customary rights, which, subject to use, were held in perpetuity.

Land was held either under granted rights of occupancy by a corporation, parastatal, or commercial farmer using capital intensive technology, or under custom by peasant farmers (Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1992).

The first of the reform initiatives after independence was the ujamaa, developed by President Nyerere in his pamphlet, "Socialism and Rural Development." Under the ujamaa system, which some authors have described as "modernization of tradition," there were three basic assumptions: (1) respect of family members, (2) common property, and (3) obligation to work. What existed within individual households was now to apply to entire settlements (Hyden 1980, pp. 97–128). One of the reasons for the confusion arising out of ujamaa was that it was conceived as a project and did not explicitly address land tenure. The Land Ordinance of 1923 still governed land matters.

In the early 1970s, Tanzania’s official political party, the TANU, began the process of villagization. The underlying motive under Operation vijiji was to resettle peasants, who had been living in scattered homesteads, into clusters of villages. The state assumed that agricultural productivity would be enhanced, because the government would be in a better position to facilitate extension services and to provide cost-effective access to physical infrastructure and social services.

Compulsory villagization in Tanzania between 1973 and 1976 is the largest resettlement effort in the history of Africa. Anywhere between 5 million people (Hyden 1980) to 11 million people (Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1982) are estimated to have been relocated into villages. As members of new villages, people could not cultivate their former lands. Either the distances to their old plots were too great from their new villages, or they were not permitted to do so by the state. Each household was assigned a house site of less than an hectare for farming purposes. In addition, they were assigned the temporary use of plots in newly created, rectangular tracts of land known as block farms. Villagers were also required to work on the village’s communal farm (Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1992, p. 8).

In 1972, in a move to remove power from local elites, the government abolished the legal autonomy of Village Councils. The structure of the Village Council, however, was retained solely for implementing development projects. Regions were elevated to the same levels as ministries, with an annual budget of their own. These moves were efforts to increase the intensity of interaction between authorities and peasants and thus to make peasants more responsive to government or party initiatives (Hyden 1980, pp. 134–35).

In 1975, primary cooperative societies were abolished, and the government passed a new act, the Villages and Ujaama Villages Act of 1975. Under this act, villages were given legal personality and thus the authority to enter into contractual agreements. Each village had to have no less than 250 resident families. All residents over the age of 18 years were to elect a Village Assembly, which in turn elected the Village Council. Village Assemblies were the ultimate authority, and the Village Council was the executive arm of the Village Assembly. Yet, since the Village Council did the actual implementation of the land policies, it garnered tremendous power.

Any allusion to the local autonomy of the village councils was more a myth, since the chairperson and secretary of the village party branch were also the chairperson and secretary of the Village Council (Hyden 1980, p. 136; Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1992, pp. 33–36). Also, every Village Assembly and Village Council was to perform its "functions solely under the auspices of the Party" (Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1992, p. 33).

What is most striking with the villagization program, as with ujamaa, is that the main legislation did not specifically address land tenure issues. The District Development Council was to set out a scheme to allocate land, and the Village Council only followed the directives of the District Council. The only legislation was that households could not transfer rights in land to anyone else without the Village Council’s prior approval. But on the status of customary rights, there was no legislation (Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1992, p. 32).

Since 1983, most block farms and communal farms created under ujamaa have been abandoned. Many households have regained control of their former fields and begun to assert customary rights in both the old plots and the new plots assigned to them at villagization (Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1992, p. 8).

Over time, the government has tried to pass a series of ad hoc legislations to secure land tenure. The 1983 Agricultural Policy, while recognizing communal and block farming as legitimate means of production, emphasized the importance of individual peasant farming. The policy stresses the need to give peasant households secure tenure so that they have the incentive to make improvements in the land. In order to secure the rights of village households, the policy recommended the establishment of a two-tier system of land leases for villages. The land would belong to the state, represented by the President, but would be leased to village councils. The village councils, in turn, would lease the land to individual users (Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1992, p. 9).

In order to implement this process of leasing, the government undertook a program of demarcating, surveying, registering, and titling all lands. People of neighbouring villages negotiated where the boundaries lay based on landmarks and other means. Only after the boundaries were determined could the surveyor place corner beacons, draw up village boundary survey maps, and prepare deeds which were finally registered with the Registrar of Titles Office for Records (Rogati 1994, pp. 10–11). Negotiating boundaries between villages themselves resulted in numerous conflicts. By 1991, only 1,200 villages, that is, less than 14 percent of all the villages in Tanzania, had been demarcated and surveyed. And of these, only 1,303 had been issued Certificates of Occupancy, and less than 200 were registered (Hoben, Bruce, and Johansson 1992, p. 69).

The prototype Dodoma Land Use and Management Project (DLUMP) has helped local villages to work through this process. In Dodoma, the village chairperson, village executive officer, ward executive officer, divisional secretary, councilors, head teachers of primary schools, and other extension officers participated in a seminar on the process of demarcating village boundaries. After negotiating the common boundaries, neighboring village councils jointly signed the minutes of their deliberations, which is evidence of their joint agreement. Next, a surveyor inspected all the boundary beacons placed by the villagers, and the two village councils signed a legal document known as the Beacon Certificate Acceptance of Boundaries (BC3). This document binds the two councils to safeguard these beacons. Village base maps are then drawn.

Next, village land-use plans are drawn up. A multidisciplinary team of physical planners, land surveyors, foresters, range management experts, and soil experts work with village land-use committees.

Within villages, individual plots are surveyed, demarcated, and provided with title deeds. Each villager determines his/her farm plot boundaries in collaboration with neighbors. After boundaries are agreed upon, the neighboring parties sign a special form, with the village council as witnesses. Then the surveyors draw a detailed cadastral map of the entire village. Whole villages are zoned into blocks and each farm plot is allotted a number. However, due to a lack of funds, full surveying of farms was, in 1994, being halted in Dodoma. The DLUMP has also prepared a format for lease agreements (Rogati 1994, pp. 9-16).