Guiding Principles:
Land Tenure in Development Cooperation

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Orientierungsrahmen:
Bodenrecht und Bodenordnung

 
Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Technische Zusammenarbeit
Abt. 45 / Div. 45

 

Roselyn Amadi (1996): Land Tenure in the IGAD Area - What Next? The IGAD Experience

Abstract

This paper does not aim to find solutions but recognizes the complexity of the subject matter that we are here to tackle. The main thrust however is that in dealing with issues that affect natural resources management we must not ignore the users or think that they have no answers. This has been recognized by the Convention as participatory approach, a concept which has been practised in the field for a long time although, (and I beg to be corrected) this is the first time it is appearing in an international legal instrument.

We are also not naive to believe that the affected people, have all the answers. Obviously we can not go back to pre-colonial times when the African way of life had experienced little or no influence from the outside. There is a lesson for all of us to learn here and education has no end.

The Transmara study brings out clearly that most of the decision that were left to be made by the Elders were misleading because the Elders were illiterate as to the applicable law adopted from outside the tribe. It seems that no attempt was made to educate the people on the new law of community ownership.

Education may have some answers but not all. In Africa, land tenure is a social issue. Sommerhalter states in his thesis on page 77 that "Conditions and systems which are intended to be improved or replaced have to be known in the first place. African indigenous land resource management systems have been ignored for too long and attempts to replace them with newly introduced schemes, which pay no respect to the existing local ones have largely failed...". This view seems to support the findings of the Transmara study.

Indeed land and the environment is part and parcel of the day to day activities and happenings of the African even today in modern times. To try and deal with 'conservation' in Africa in purely scientific or western and managerial terms would be to repeat the mistakes history has shown us. At the end of the day, however we hope we shall come up with a clear direction of "What Next!"

 

The terms employed in this document and the presentation of data contained therein do not imply, on the part of the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS), any opinion concerning the legal status of countries, territories, cities and zones, or their authorities, or the demarcation of their borders or confines. The opinions and recommendations presented in this report which are the result of a workshop do not necessarily represent the position of the OSS.

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