Ephraim Keoreng
19 June 2009
Lack of coordination between urban and rural land authorities hampers land management in Botswana, according to a Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis (BIDPA) study that has been gathering dust on office shelves since it was released some years ago.
The rapidly increasing demand for land and its shortage in urban and rural land areas has created pressure on peri-urban areas, the study says.
The report also notes that though land is not elastic, the population keeps growing. It refers to the 1990s land acquisition in Mogoditshane which spiralled into a virtual land grab.
"The problems were temporarily allayed after all of the offenders were fined P5,000. In the late 1990s, the problem recurred, but this time the Kweneng Land Board reacted by demolishing the squatter residential properties.
"The land board received strong backing from the Ministry of Lands and Housing but it has been challenged in court by some of those whose houses have been demolished," says the report.
In the early 1990s, says the report, the land problems in peri-urban areas had resulted in corruption scandals that necessitated the creation of a presidential commission of enquiry, the Kgabo Commission, in 1992. The findings blamed the then vice-president, Peter Mmusi and Daniel Kwelagobe, then a Minister of Agriculture.
The Kgabo Report, which implicated Mmusi and Kwelagobe for their part in unconventional dealings in land, was invalidated by the High Court on the basis that "the hearings of the inquiry should not have been held in camera, but in public," according to the report.
The BIDPA report also decries the problem of access to agricultural land. The most affected are small districts like South East and North East due to their closeness to the country's two cities.
The South East District is close to Gaborone, whereas the North East borders Francistown in the north.
Besides, says the report, arable land in Botswana is estimated at five percent of Botswana's land area.
"The best soils, which are most suited to arable farming, occur in eastern Botswana in the freehold areas. Pastoral farming has extended over the Kgalagadi sands, where vegetation is more fragile due to erratic rainfall and poor soils. Pastoral farming in the sand-veld can only be afforded by those with resources to exploit underground water," the report says.
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