By Amin Kef Sesay
Due to the conundrum of disputes among the State, communities, land owning families and individuals, the new Minister of Lands upon assuming office announced setting up of a Lands Dispute Resolution Complaints Committee which has become effective.
After many years of poor lands administration and management by the Ministry, injustice, and sometimes violent confrontation involving armed men, police and soldiers, the Committee’s remit is to look into land disputes between April 2018 and January 2021.
For a start, the Committee should predicate its work on the question of what is State Land and what is private and community land and how their ownership is determined.
The reason why land disputes are so pervasive is because it underpins all human activity, including dwelling, farming, agriculture, industry, leisure and sports.
Land is the object of competition in a number of potentially overlapping ways: as an economic asset, as a connection with identity and social legitimacy and as a political territory.
Competition over land and its resources is at the center of the nexus between land and conflict. Competition can occur between any number and type of identity groups, whether based on ethnicity, religion, class, gender, or generation.
Land-related issues figure into many violent disputes around the world. Ongoing communal violence in Nigeria and Sudan is tied to competition over scarce fertile land and poor resource governance.
Disputes over access to land and valuable mineral resources drove wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the nearly 25-year war in Sri Lanka was fought over geographic claims to an ethnic homeland for the country’s minority population.
Understanding the role land plays in the conflicts of so many nations can help policymakers develop strategies to ease tensions among groups, limit conflict, and potentially avoid violence and the poverty trap.
Failure to address these bedrock issues may increase the likelihood of conflict and perpetuate poverty.
To address land-related conflict, it is essential to correctly identify the roles played by land in the conflict.
What factors create vulnerability to land conflict, heighten unproductive competition, and exacerbate tension?
Are these factors the primary cause of conflict, or are there other contributing factors?
Some important factors that create vulnerability to land conflict include:
Land scarcity: Due to legal constraints on access, skewed distribution among users, or an absolute shortage of land in relation to demand, scarcity can leave many with little or no land and create intense competition for land.
This scarcity can result from generally very high person/land ratios but can also be distributional, where one group has appropriated most land, leaving land a scarce good for most others.
It can be influenced by demographic shifts and factors such as climate change and can be either national or local.
The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in the global demand for land, driven by growing demand for mining and agricultural products, biofuels, carbon sequestration, and conservation uses.
The new demand offers developing countries opportunities for badly needed foreign direct investment and inputs of technical and managerial expertise.
In many developing countries Governments consider land not registered as private lands to be allocated at will for investors. For this reason, vast expanses of public lands attract the interest of private investors. However, Governments and investors alike may fail to take into account that what appears to be vacant and sparsely settled lands are in fact claimed by local communities.
Much of the public land being committed to new uses has been used and claimed under local custom for generations by local communities. Large areas of such land are often land used as pasture or cultivated under forest-fallow systems.
Land is a limited and multipurpose resource and most countries depend upon some combination of markets and regulatory frameworks to mediate competition.
If these mechanisms are working well, conflict is unlikely, but markets are often constrained by regulatory and administrative barriers or by information problems, and politicians, local authorities and crooked judiciary officials often thwart good land governance.
