A presentation focusing on facts about land and land dispossession in South Africa

The report is structured into nine chapters and an appendix:

The main aim of this study was to assess, within the context of the Malonda Programme in Niassa Province, the implementation of community consultations and negotiations as well as the delimitation and demarcation of community land. These activities had been carried out within the context of requests from several investors concerning the Right to Use and Exploit Land (Portuguese acronym DUAT, Direito de Uso e Aproveitamento de Terra), in order to create wide commercial forest plantations in Niassa.

The meaning and scope of the concept of Community-Based Property Rights (CBPR) has become a dominant feature of conservation and development policy discourse over the last decade. The debate has largely been shaped by the growing trends where governments have continued to appropriate traditional lands for conservation and development activities that have resulted into large scale dislocation and widespread disenfranchisement of sections of our society.

Tenure in Mystery collates information on land under conservation, forestry and mining in the Karamoja region. Whereas significant changes in the status of land tenure took place with the Parliamentary approval for degazettement of approximately 54% of the land area under wildlife conservation in 2002, little else happened to deliver this update to the beneficiary communities in the region. Instead enclaves of information emerged within the elite and political leadership, by means of which personal interests and rewards were being secured and protected.

The illegal and irregular allocations of public land as chronicled in the Ndungu Report amount to a rip-off that dwarfs the Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing scandals. Our analysis in this first issue in the series covers Karura, Ngong Road and Kiptagich forests and suggests a loss of public resources in excess of Ksh.18.4 billion. The Ndungu Report covers ten other forests as well as other public land, ranging from road reserves to cemeteries to public toilets and even State House land. As we cover these in future issues of the series, the cumulative loss will certainly be astounding.

With the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010 (CoK 2010), land was classified into public, private and community lands, occasioning the need for clear guidelines on acquisition of public land acquisition within the community land while appreciating the provision of the Community Land Act, 2016.