Delivery and land management

Richard Moleofe | Friday April 11, 2014 11:09

* Finance,

* Manpower,

* Machinery (Equipment) and

* Materials.

This week we look at the aspect of land and apply the four ingredients of delivery on the state of land management in the country and investigate the bottlenecks that throttle delivery in that area. Land is and will always be the primary means of production and this is why it is critical to always account for the manner in which this asset is managed in Botswana.

For the purpose of this delivery review, we shall look at land management in Mogoditshane because of the previous and existing problems there. Mogoditshane remains to be Gaborone’s bedroom and the current shortage of land in the city will of course make this suburban åthe most sort after piece of real estate in the country for many years to come. If everyone is desiring to own a piece of land in Mogoditshane, government must in this case provide everything possible to drive delivery.

 

Finance

The Ministry of Lands and Housing has in the past been afforded what one may term as sufficient funding and it has consistently been one of the top five ministry in the hierarchy of the national budget. But in the process of distributing the funding further down to all its departments, Kweneng Landboard and in particular Mogoditshane Sub-Landboard has not been made a priority.

In fact the way it is equated to others such as Motokwe Sub-Landboard gives the idea of how the powers that be at the ministry treat the urgency of land issues in Mogoditshane. The provision of sufficient funding will become the bedrock for fulfilling the right parameters of delivery.

Manpower

The lack of funding is further reflected in the way this land office is staffed. Mogoditshane Sub-Landboard is indisputably the busiest land office in the country. Much busier than its superior office in Molepolole. Regardless of this glaring evidence, government has not seen the urgency on the matter and that continues to be reflected in the way this land office is staffed. Government has found a convenient way of exploiting graduates by placing them in its offices as interns. This has not helped delivery in the general area of land management and particularly in the Mogoditshane office. The permanent staff is so few and they are constantly in the process of educating and orientating the new interns into the system. The turnover rate at this land office for interns is very high. In this case it prevents the secretary and his permanent staff from focusing on issues of delivery but rather they are forever training newcomers and orientating them into the system.

Members of the public are quite unforgiving when it comes to the service they receive at Mogoditshane Sub-Landboard. But the record needs to be set straight here, the office is just highly understaffed and hence the poor service levels. Regardless of the facts on the ground in terms of need, this office is still staffed according to the staffing requirements for all other Sub-Landboards in the district. Unless government sees the need to addresses the issue of staffing in Mogoditshane, land problems will continue to grow in that area.

Shortage of manpower in Mogoditshane land office has caused the current staff to try some innovation by augmenting the shortages and in the process this has upset members of the public. The innovation was to schedule the access of the different services on different days. For instance, certificate collection at the Land Registration Office is only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In between, the other days are used for site visits and the preparation of certificates and leases. If a customer comes from Kasane to collect their certificate on the wrong day, they are returned and this is counterproductive and hampers delivery. In fact the schedule for collection of certificates and access to other services has no legal basis unless it has been gazetted. Therefore customers must be allowed to come in any day when it suits them. The staff continues to wallow in frustration and low morale because the employer seems not to care about manpower shortages.

 

Equipment

Equipment in a land office will include offices, vehicles and such other machinery like Global Positioning Systems. The lack of machinery is hampering the delivery of land in Mogoditshane. For instance, members of the public have now grown weary of the same old story of  “koloi ga e o” when clients are waiting to be taken to the field for a site visit. If there are not enough vehicles to service the needs of the clientele that persistently applies pressure, what more of other office needs? Within the setting of any land office including that of Mogoditshane, surveyors consistently need to be surveying land for the provision of new plots and for this they need equipment in order for them to be ahead of demand. 

 

Materials

Materials as a means of production here refers to things such as fuel for vehicles, photocopying paper and all the other expendables. The management of such simple things seem to be giving a big headache at the Mogoditshane land office. Some of these may look very simple but they are critical in the process of land management and ultimately in the final product which is availability of land. The process is only complete when the land board has produced the final product which in this case is the delivery of land to those who have been in the waiting list for the last two decades. The peculiarity of Mogoditshane Sub-Landboard in comparison to many others in the country is that the office processes a large number of land transfers.

These are high consumers of printing paper as many forms are required to complete the process. Furthermore, the Land Registration Office is required to make a site visit to inspect if the required developments are in place for the transfer to effect. From the perspective of the Board, going out in the field to service customers is often a headache. The technical officer who accompanies the Board is often ill equipped with old GPS and if it’s a recent one it would not have batteries to operate.

These are small things that seem ignorable but they tie down the board prevent it from fulfilling its mandate of delivering land to the people. It seems Kweneng Landboard has not learnt any material lessons in the way it conducts its fleet of vehicles. Refuelling is done centrally at Molepolole and this consumes time and in the process large amount of fuel is lost in the trips. The accurate measurement of delivery in the area of land and in particular in a locality such as Mogoditshane would be the provision of plots to members of the public who have been on the waiting list and hopeful of being honoured over the years.

That delivery measurement can only be met when government shows the determination to show land as the end product in the process of delivery. If government recognises that land is the basis for all means of production, then a great priority in the provision of the right resources is needed to be put in place for the landboards and in particular the Mogoditshane office.

*Richard Moleofe is a social commentator