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Gambia: Land Disputes
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The Daily Observer (Banjul)
EDITORIAL
4 April 2008
Posted to the web 4 April 2008
As Machiavelli, the classical political theorist, said take a man's life and people will forget it because they can't bring him back to life, but take a man's property and they will fight you to the end in the hope of getting the property back. Land all over the world is a very contentious issue.
As we have seen in Zimbabwe and other places people fight hard for their land - even centuries after it was stolen from them. The organisation in Kenya known as Mau Mau was in infact formally known as The Land and Freedom Army.
We have to be careful how we dispossess people of their land. It is very important to follow the traditional systems of land ownership in The Gambia and to respect that traditional system if we are not to create social discord. We have seen the horrors of what can happen if people feel that injustice has been done with respect to their rightful ownership of land. We must avoid this sense of injustice at any cost.
In The Gambia we have laws which allow the authorities to take our land for a useful community purpose. For example if the Government felt that someone's land is in a good position for a school or a hospital the government can take the land and will offer the owner compensation in monetary terms or in other land. So good laws for good community possession of someone's land are there.
But there are no laws which allow any bigshot government official or businessman to grab powerless ordinary people's land. Such behavior is dangerous as it leads to social discord and alienation from authority.
In Gambia today the only wealth many ordinary people have is their land. Many of these people, mainly in the villages, are poor but proud because they have land to leave to their children. It is not fair if the only thing they have got, their land, is grabbed from them through unscrupulous means by people in authority, and by those who can bribe those in authority.
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The APRC Government is first and foremost about looking after the weak in society. We are certain that once this matter gets to the notice of authorities high up and the High Court has dealt with it, the Government will take steps to discourage land grabbers especially in the kombos villages as such land grabbing causes social disharmony.
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