Statement by
Kenya Land Alliance (KLA)
Lumumba Odenda

Ours has been an experience in the East African Sub-region where we started the land policy formulation process by revisiting our land policies, laws and institutions. The last ten years of the last century and with the end of the Cold War there was a general push for a change of land policies, institutions within our region and the first country that commenced this effort was Tanzania. In Tanzania the National Land Policy froemulation process started around 1991 with the collection and collation of the Tanzanian people's views of what they wanted to do with their land. Uganda followed suit in 1995 after the new Constitution provided that the country had to promulgate a new land law to govern land matters. Rwanda was the third in line, and I am mentioning Rwanda simply because within the East African Landnet Sub-region, Rwanda is categorized as part of East Africa though traditional Rwanda has been part of Central Africa. Kenya with the most complex land question in the region is at last currently going through the process.

Who are the real actors within this review effort? We have had the governments taking the lead role, since land policy is in the remit of the governments of the day. Second, we have had the development partners whose major role has been contribution of the financial and technical support to ensure that the land policies in the four countries take care of the global interest and their bilateral concerns. The others Actors have been the civil-society organizations that came on board to help vocalize the needs and the views of the people (disadvantaged general citizenry).

However, the important concern about the process in the region is that the primary stakeholders i.e. the vulnerable and disadvantaged people whose livelihoods depend on land directly, have not been properly involved in all the four countries. As a result all the people who have been very active at the land policy formulation process have been the secondary stakeholders. That in itself has been a weakness. It is a weakness in that secondary stakeholders' passion about the issues at stake can not go beyond their secondary interests, which are not as basic as those of primary stakeholders whose livelihoods directly depend on land for their survival. Indeed in Tanzania, the civil society pushed the reform process so much but it reached a point when the most leading civil society organization, the Land Rights Research and Resource Institute (in Kiswahili " HAKIARDHI" decided to back out of the process because it could not agree with the government when they brought in the experts to draft the final legislation on the agreed upon land reforms. That created a very major problem in that the process was more or less hijacked by external forces leaving the primary stakeholders at a loss since they had banked on HAKIARDHI to champion their interests as their partner. Although the vacuum was filled by the Gender Center by it is very limited mandate it only pressurized for the gender considerations within the policy reform and not all the pertinent concerns of other sectors . So Tanzania to date has ended up with two legislations - one basically governing land in general, the second one purportedly governing the village lands which are community lands. Despite the fore mentioned problems Tanzania has not had resources, even to implement those policies in place. The Tanzanian scenario is clear show that although civil society organizations were engaged in the policy formulation process, but at the level of implementation they have "run out of steam". Now policy decision-makers are grappling with the issues alone unmonitored.

In Uganda, the Uganda Land Alliance (ULA) mobilized civil society organizations to engage in land issues. It duly participated in the promulgation of the Land Act of 1998 The ULA is basically known and remembered for the Co-Ownership Clause, a clause supporting the women's land rights in the country. However, after pushing strongly, the male chauvinists in the Uganda Parliament decided to drop the clause during the enactment of the Land Act of 1998I in Parliament. But ULA has been credited for their efforts in pursuing this issue to the extent that in the recent amendment of the Land Act it came back in form of a provision on family land.

It is important to mention that the biggest challenge to these reforms pushed by the civil society is their entire dependency on external funding. For instance ULA is at the moment in a transitional crisis; resources are not flowing in as in the beginning, and yet this is a point at which implementation is crucial and requires a lot of resources to monitor and evaluate the government serious in implementing legal and institutional reforms in place.

Rwanda node of the East African LandNet Sub-region has pushed hard and they now have a land law,and land policy. This was done by Landnet, Rwanda, who pushed the process very effectively. Incidentally the Rwandan position is a bit complicated. Whereas the ordinary people wanted community land tenure, the Rwandan process ended up banning the customary land tenure system for fear of anther genocide because of the land claims in Rwanda . In my view this is an interesting aspect worthy noting in that the stakeholders to the process and the government like the case in Uganda and Tanzania ended up at variance without consensus.

In Kenya the challenges are massive since the process is on-going at the moment. We in Civil Society are pushing as much as we can, hoping that our input will achieve land policies, land laws and institutions are democratic but there is a lot of vested interests, and just like in the other three countries, we too are also dependant on donor funding. There are strings attached to some of the donor funds. Given the fact that the NGOs are at the centre stage, again we fear that the process may not go its logical conclusion because the ordinary people are not sufficiently involved. So what are we doing to redress this identified challenge? Realizing this challenge that faces us we have been engaged in mobilizing and reaching out to people to participate in this process in their own right so as to reduce the NGOs role as central actors on behalf of the people themselves. Our worst fear is when it comes to implementation we are not sure whether what we are proposing shall be implemented given that the governments have not yet made any financial commitments to the land reforms.

Equally disturbing and challenging is the fact that although in all 4 countries we have been pushing the women's land issues to be considered - a very major issue - we are afraid that our society in the East African Sub-region might not be willing or ready yet to support Women land rights.

The management of public land and where the radical title rests is another major challenge in all the four countries, because contrary to the wishes of the governments the people have pushed for the radical title to vest in the citizenry to counter government abuse of the administration and management of public land.