Beggars on beaches of gold
Mmegi Editor | Friday June 13, 2014 15:10
City fathers say the churches are illegally occupying land and have not only become an eyesore but a source of noise pollution for residents. The churches themselves, many of them dating back to the 1950s, argue that the City first barred them from holding meetings in homes, then failed to allocate them land for their worship.
The happenings in Francistown are replicated around the country on a daily basis in an obscene homage to the irony that is land shortages in Botswana.
It boggles the mind how one of Southern Africa’s largest countries, with one of the smallest populations, can have issues of land shortages to the extent that worshippers are dragged kicking and screaming from their prayers.
Of the experts who have written tomes on the root of the land crisis, nearly all agree that policy failures and myopia are to blame for the woes Batswana find themselves in.
One expert writes that land shortages in Botswana are closely attributed to “out-of-date planning regulations” that limit land-use.
From Francistown to Jwaneng, to Kazungula, the land issue has hampered optimal land use, citizen empowerment and broad-based economic growth.
In urban areas land shortages are more acute and in these, the spectre of public sector corruption has added its weight to the policy failures causing problems elsewhere. The Land Administration Procedures, Capacity and Systems (LAPCAS) project, while being a welcome and much-needed development in land administration, is inching along at a pace far too slow for the landless masses whose names abound on waiting lists across the country.
According to its proponents, LAPCAS will result in “the successful social and economic development of the nation of Botswana, based on efficient, effective and transparent land administration”. However, key elements such as the unique plot numbering system, national land registration exercise and record management at land authorities, are only now gathering momentum five years after the project began.
Policymakers would do well to pick a leaf from the World Bank’s Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystems Services (WAVES) project, which aims to account for the price, value and impact on national wealth of even a square metre of land.
Land administrators should adopt the ethos that each and every centimetre of land in Botswana must be used for the benefit of Batswana, whether it is residential, commercial, industrial or otherwise.
Halting or disjointed attempts at land administration risk infuriating the already frustrated “landless masses” and we need not look too far across our borders to see the extreme consequences.
Today’s thought
“The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.”
– Margaret Mitchell