Facilitate optimal usage of land

Kevin Mokento | Monday December 6, 2021 06:00

In the long-term, other factors may come into play, such as land degradation, which may have the effect of shrinking useable land. At least coastal countries endowed with monetary resources can reclaim land from oceans and seas. A few world wise people would argue that land is a political resource because its use, whether optimal or sub-optimal, largely hinges on the implementation of government driven policies. Left to the whims of market forces and super aggressive financial systems, land use will naturally gravitate to the most profitable uses, and this can result in an unbalanced use of land, and failure to accommodate sustainability and environmental protection. Projected population growth demands that custodians of land should shimmy towards a multi-generational view of land and ensure that while they provide for current demands, plans are put in place for driving productive use of land to benefit future generations.

This calls upon all custodians of state and tribal land to jealously guard its usage without necessarily impeding economic development. One day, such forward-looking individuals would look in the rearview mirror and see a positive trail of their decisions in the development of the country. A balanced use of land would not ignore its long-term ecological health. It would consider equitable distribution of land across the entire spectrum of sectors essential for growth and sustainability and the importance of reserving adequate pieces for construction essential for human settlement, leisure as in parks and green areas, nature conservation, economic activity in the form of industries and commercial activities, infrastructure critical for sustaining developments, and arable land vital for food self-sufficiency and food security.

This breeds the question, as a nation, how are we doing on the issue of optimising on land usage? Are we utilising land to its full potential? Or are we cursed with the hoarding of land by resource-strained individuals endowed with neither the vision nor the willingness to fully utilise it? In recognition of the importance of land to economic growth, shouldn’t we disabuse ourselves of the notion that land barons and other land hoarders should take their time to do whatever they wish with such an important national resource? Have we empowered institutions charged with the authority to allocate land, and push for its development, to deliver on their mandate? Do you sometimes hold the view that some portions of land in your city are lying idle? Can these pieces of land benefit the nation through a deliberate plan to intensify developments or a structured redevelopment programme? Owing to acute shortage of serviced land in the capital city, the government’s drive must be in favour of redevelopments or densification.

This would facilitate production of more residential units per unit measure of land. A few areas are ripe for this form of development. Let’s discuss three examples. One, near the intersection of Nyerere Drive and Nelson Mandela Road, popularly known as the Bull and Bush junction, are two chunks of land measuring 5.3 hectares, Lots 54849 and 54850 Gaborone.

This prime land is a stone’s throw from the Main Mall, the Government Enclave, the new Central Business District, the bus rank, and multiple commercial centres. Sparsely strewn on this big piece of land are 80 small bungalows with less than 10% plot coverage. A conservative estimate suggests that were this area to be fully redeveloped, considering its prime location and the demand likely to be generated, well over 300 vastly superior high-rise, functional and aesthetically appealing residential units can be developed on the land. Imagine what the supply of so many units would do to the backlog of applications for housing by the youth, civil servants or police officers who are in dire need of accommodation.

It is such a shame to see this area underutilised, when hardly five minutes away from it, in the CBD, sits the gainfully developed i-Towers. Two, the government owns sizeable pieces of land in the Village in Gaborone. Sitting on these plots are small, detached houses, with a development to plot size ratio of well below 50%. Surely, for such a strategic area, the land is not optimally used. In the same area, in recognition of the development potential of the land, some private developers and the Botswana Housing Corporation (BHC) have redeveloped their plots, and this has resulted in the delivery of new apartments and townhouses. Three, BHC owns a good number of small flat-roofed residential units in Partial, near the Nyerere Drive shopping centre. The nation stands to benefit massively from the redevelopment of this area.

Guided by the need to rationalise and optimise land usage, ideally, the whole area occupied by these small structures must be reconfigured, and the plots strategically consolidated, to facilitate delivery of more units in a clustered development setting. The fiscal challenges faced by the government are understandable, particularly those caused by the gobbling of financial resources by the health sector in the fight against COVID-19. For the three areas to be redeveloped, the government does not have to invest a single dime. For the underutilised space in Partial, political willingness is required to facilitate redevelopment, and enable BHC to source funding from the capital markets. For the pieces of land in the Village and near the Bull and Bush junction, the government has two options. If the idea is to provide quality accommodation at reasonable prices for first-time buyers, the land can be transferred to BHC at no cost or at submarket rates. The cost of development, and the pricing of finished products, will be reduced by the fact that part of the requisite infrastructure is already in place and might only need to be revamped to accommodate more units. Private developers normally cry foul, lamenting that the government favours BHC. In my view, all that positive discrimination is in order, considering that BHC prioritises sale of units to citizens and citizen-owned companies, particularly first-time buyers.

The second option would be for the government to open the redevelopment of the areas to the private sector and demand that unhoused Batswana compete with citizen and foreign investors. Several pieces of horticultural land in villages surrounding Gaborone are underutilised. A few are used for horticultural activities while most are sitting idle. Notwithstanding that, such pieces of land continue to change hands and speculative hoarding is taking place. Land use is dynamic, and it is important for structural and development plans to take that into account.

It would be worthwhile for the government to produce the requisite plans that would facilitate productive economic use of the land while careful not to kill opportunities for arable use that is a precondition for food security. In coming up with policies essential for land use, the overarching goal must not only target the extirpation of slothfulness in accommodating dynamic use of land but must also serve to dispassionately drive the sustainable land management (SLM) agenda.

SLM is defined by TerrAfrica (2005) as, “The adoption of land use systems that through appropriate management practices enable land users to maximise the economic and social benefits from the land while maintaining or enhancing the ecological support functions of the land resources.” A prevalent human foible, particularly by non-creative and thrown jobsworths in the civil service, is to gallop towards the space of impeding development by rigidly clutching at anti-progressive regulations ad infinitum, and this normally results in a cavalier and ad hockery style of addressing critical issues.

If a practical framework is put in place to facilitate sustainable development of land by relevant state organs, this will indeed ward off potential for sub-optimal use of land. All custodians of land should never be too much in the forest to recognise the trees!