6 August 2008
Matola — The municipal authorities in the southern Mozambican city of Matola dealt with 2,080 cases of land disputes between January 2007 and June 2008, according to the interim mayor of Matola, Maria Vicente.
These were just some of the thousands of cases that have been referred to municipal officials.
Vicente told reporters on Tuesday that to try and deal with such disputes, the Municipal Council, in cooperation with the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), is installing a geographical reference system to help manage land in Maputo. She described this as an important step towards digitalizing the land registry.
The local authorities are also working to reduce the time to process applications for land tenure from the current 45 to 30 days. In 2007, this process took at least three months, and this was an improvement on the 11 months it took in 2004.
Because of the growing number of land conflicts in Matola, the municipality has designed a plan for the outlying neighbourhoods of Matlhemele and Boquisso which has allowed it to demarcate 1,190 and 3,633 plots respectively.
"This year, we have designed plans for Matlhemele, and Boquisso. During this period, we dealt with 2,080 cases to solve land conflicts, and we also granted land tenure on 500 plots to disabled war veterans", she said.
This is an old problem in Matola, worsened by the long period that it used to take to grant land titles, which led to the same plot being granted to more than one person.
Another problem is that the municipal authorities sometimes granted a person a plot that had been occupied by somebody else for at least ten years, the minimum period, under Mozambican law, for that de facto occupation to be legally recognised.
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