Land Audit Seeks Answers To Land Problems In Urban Areas
Gothataone Moeng | Monday July 28, 2014 18:13
These questions could be answered soon if a parliamentary motion by legislator Dumelang Saleshando gets the blessing of the house.
It is a case of second time lucky for the Gaborone Central MP after he had a similar motion rejected by the majority of the ruling party MPs last year.
On Friday, Saleshando, also the leader of opposition in parliament placed before Parliament another motion calling for investigations into land scarcity in urban centres.
Saleshando asked the House to decide on a comprehensive land audit to establish the factors that have led to demand outstripping supply in most urban centres. Saleshando said the envisioned audit would also establish land ownership patterns in the country.
Saleshando reiterated in his new motion that it did not make sense for a country as big as Botswana, with as small a population to be grappling with land scarcity and decades-long waiting lists for land allocation. He said there was a lack of transparency in the land management and allocation system, which has led to citizens waiting for 20 years for land whereas a foreigner who has been in the country for only 10 years can accumulate large tracts of land in Gaborone alone. He said the audit would establish who owns what plots and how they came to own the plot. He said urban centres such as Francistown, have shortage of land, even though they have wide tracts of land owned by absentee landlords.
“In Francistown, there is one absentee landlord. If that land was to be allocated, over 70,000 plots would be gained from his land. 70,000 people could have land,” he said.
Saleshando said he was aware of government’s Land Administration Procedures Capacity and Systems (LAPCAS) but said it was inadequate as the process was only recording ownership of land, without delving into the factors that have led to low supply and demand. He said waiting for the LAPCAS process would essentially be postponing dealing with the problem as after the process, all that would be known is who owns what, but not the factors explaining the discrepancies in ownership patterns.
His previous motion, which he presented in March 2013, requested government to carry out a comprehensive land audit in all urban, peri-urban, freehold farms and tourism frontier settlements with the objective of establishing ownership, values, tenure and synergy between planned and actual use.
His old motion was defeated mainly due to government’s insistence, through the Minister of Lands and Housing, Lebonaamang Mokalake, that government had already started a similar process of registering and capturing history on all awarded plots through LAPCAS. At the time Mokalake said it did not make financial sense to have a parallel audit, given the money government had already used on the project.
There are already indications that this new motion will be defeated through a majority vote from the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), judging by the indifference the debate was treated by the ruling party MPs on Friday.
In the debates, only one BDP MP Charles Tibone debated, with only opposition MPs commenting and supporting the motion.
Tibone also supported the motion, saying that although he believes that LAPCAS would have some value, it would not address the disparities in land ownership and would not investigate the cause of the disparities. He said there was a need to not only stop the maladministration of land, but to also seek land management solutions going forward.
Debates on the motion are expected to continue on Friday.