I/N 9

211 Albania .............ALL900

Austria ................. €7.50Bahrain ........ Dinar4.75Belgium ............... €7.50Bosnia ............... BAM16Bulgaria ............ BGN13

Croatia ...............HRK48Cyprus ................. €7.50Czech Rep .......CZK199Denmark ............DKr53Estonia ................ €7.50Finland ................ €7.50

France .................. €7.50Germany ............. €7.50Gibraltar .........GIP5.99Greece ................. €7.50Hungary ...... HUF2,170 Iceland ............... IKr860

Ireland ................. €7.50Israel ..............NIS43.00Italy ...................... €7.50Kazakhstan..KZT2,800Kenya ..............KShs800Kuwait ......... Dinar3.60

Latvia ................... €7.50Lithuania ............. €7.50Luxembourg ...... €7.50Malta .................... €7.50Montenegro ....... €7.50Netherlands ....... €7.50

Norway...............NKr66Poland ............... PLN29Portugal CONT .. €7.50Qatar ................. Rials45Romania ........... RON29Russia ............. RUB700

Saudi Arabia ... Rials50Serbia ..............RSD720Slovakia ............... €7.50Slovenia .............. €7.50South Africa .....R70.00Spain .................... €7.50

Sweden ..............SKR66Switzerland ...... CHF10Turkey ....................TL24UAE ............ Dirhams45UK ......................... £5.99US ....................US$7.99

SEPTEMBER 12TH–18TH 2020

Office politics: the future of work

Britain, international lawbreaker?

Netflix and the Hastings doctrine

The missing flu season

Whose land?The elusive quest for property rights

in the developing world

20200912_ECR_MEADE_001.indd 120200912_ECR_MEADE_001.indd 1 09/09/2020 18:5909/09/2020 18:59

The Economist September 12th 2020 31

1

Builders are busy outside Louisa Qan-giso’s house in Khayelitsha, a township

on the outskirts of Cape Town. The 49-year-old is putting up eight studio flats in herbackyard that she will rent out for 3,000rand ($177) per month. This could almosttriple the value of her property, fromroughly 570,000 to 1.6m rand. These arelife-changing sums for Ms Qangiso, agrandmother whose warehouse job paysjust 5,000 rand a month. “This is my dreamcome true,” she says, holding back tears.

The dream is reality because of Ms Qan-giso’s grit—and because, unlike most peo-ple in the township, she can demonstrateownership of her property. Aided by Bit-prop, a startup, she proved her claim on theland, then used the title to raise money forthe building works. Over the next decadeshe will split the rent with Bitprop, whichalso designs the flats, until its share is paidback. Thereafter the takings, as well as theincrease in the asset value, are hers.

Ms Qangiso’s story encapsulates the la-tent power of property rights. Twenty yearsago Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian econo-

mist, published “The Mystery of Capital”,in which he argued that, without formal ti-tle, the real estate on which billions of poorpeople live and work is “dead capital”. Heestimated these assets to be worth $9.3trn($13.5trn in today’s money).

Partly inspired by Mr de Soto, over thepast two decades there has been a flurry ofattempts to map and parcel land in the de-veloping world. Between 2004 and 2009the World Bank committed to 34 land-tit-ling and registration projects worth morethan $1bn, compared with three between1990 and 1994.

Yet the potential of property rights re-mains largely unrealised, especially in Af-rica. Perhaps 90% of rural land in Africa isnot formally documented. Just 4% of Afri-

can countries have mapped and titled theprivate land in their capital cities. Well-meaning reformers have often neglectedthe myriad other factors affecting whethertitles are useful or not, such as custom,other laws and the capacity of the state toenforce people’s legal property rights. Theyhave also underestimated the ability ofvested interests, such as traditional leadersand urban elites, to obstruct reform.

Covid-19 highlights the harm that inse-cure property rights cause. Evictions andland grabs are rising, as newly jobless ten-ants cannot pay rent and bigwigs figurethey can get away with skulduggery whileeveryone’s attention is on the pandemic.The economic fallout of the coronavirus isso severe that some African countries facea lost decade. So they need growth-boost-ing reforms more than ever.

As history shows, land reform is hard.Policies in the colonial era varied, butwhite rulers often designated huge areasterra nullius (unoccupied land) and appro-priated it for their colonies. Formal proper-ty rights were reserved for settlers andEuropean firms. The rest of the agriculturalland was given “customary” tenure, mean-ing it could be used but not owned, and thatit was always subject to seizure by the state.Colonists often ruled indirectly, via state-sanctioned “tribal” leaders who exercisedcontrol over the land.

After independence most African gov-ernments kept bifurcated systems. Urbanelites replaced white colonists in state in-

Property rights

Parcels, plots and power

K H AY E LI TS H A

The unfulfilled potential of land reform in Africa

Middle East & Africa

34 Jordan whacks its teachers’ union

34 Serbia and Kosovo embrace Israel

35 America’s F-35 diplomacy

Also in this section

Issue Date: 12-09-2020 Zone: EUDE Desk: MidEastAfrica Output on: 10-09-2020----09:18 Page: MA1 Revision: 0

32 Middle East & Africa The Economist September 12th 2020

2

1

stitutions. Customary systems in rural ar-eas endured. Only towards the end of the20th century did the notion of formalisingmore of the land take off. By this time theidea that a lack of property rights was abrake on development was commonplace.

Africa has half of the world’s usable un-cultivated land, and its agricultural pro-ductivity is far below its potential. That is ahuge drag on growth. Because people in thecountryside do not have title to their landthey typically cannot rent it out while theyare away, and they may fear it may be takenby someone else. This discourages migra-tion to the cities, where wages are higher.

Insecure tenure makes cities poorer,too. Dense urban populations normallymake it easier for people to share ideas andfind work. But African cities sprawl ineffi-ciently. The World Bank reckons that insome of them 30% of land is not built on,compared with 14% in, say, Paris. Overlap-ping tenure regimes are one reason why. InKampala, Uganda, a bewildering mix offreehold, leasehold, customary and “dualownership” systems gum up formal landmarkets (see map on right).

Insert titleWeak property rights aggravate many otherills. They encourage environmental degra-dation—if it is not clear who owns the for-est it is easier for well-connected business-es to claim it and cut it down. Land disputesare a common cause of conflict. Informalland markets mean governments miss outon taxes. And sexist traditions often makewomen’s property rights especially inse-cure. According to a survey by Prindex, a re-search group, nearly half of women in sub-Saharan Africa worry that they would loseland if they were divorced or widowed.

All rich, democratic countries have se-cure property rights, enabling owners tobuy, sell, subdivide and collateralise their

assets. Many poor countries have tried tobuild something similar, usually startingwith a formal registry of land ownership. In2012, for example, Rwanda, completed aprogramme to map and title all of its landusing aerial photography, paid for by Brit-ain’s government. Those carrying out theproject had to tread carefully. Many of theoriginal occupants of plots had been killedin the genocide in 1994; others had beenlocked up for their part in it. The teammade visits to prisons to help resolve landdisputes. The cost per parcel was just $7—much lower than efforts that relied on tra-ditional surveying. Before the project mostwomen were not recognised as landhold-ers; at the end, a woman’s name was on92% of the deeds.

Yet the overall impact of titling initia-tives has been disappointing. Most Africancountries still use paper records. They usu-ally do not know how many titles they haveissued or whether more than one personclaims ownership; in Khayelitsha, the staffat a local advice centre note that 15% of thetitles in the surrounding area are in thenames of dead people. The share of Afri-cans who have formal title deeds is there-fore unknown, but in some countries it ismost likely in the single digits.

Poor administration compounds theproblem. On average in Africa it takes 59days to register a property. Transferringdeeds costs 9% of the property’s value,more than twice the share in the oecd, aclub of mostly rich countries. Land survey-ors are scarce and monopolistic. A lack oftrust does not help, either. In a differentpart of Khayelitsha from where Ms Qasingolives, a group of women meet members ofKhaya Lam (My Home), a charitable projectthat pays for title deeds to be proven. Onelady struggles to believe that someonewould help her for next to nothing. Wavingher title she asks: “Is this for real?” Corrup-

tion in South Africa means people are scep-tical, says Temba Nolutshungu of the FreeMarket Foundation, a think-tank. “Peopleare used to being lied to by those with a po-litical agenda.”

Technology may help. There is a gooddeal of enthusiasm around digital plat-forms such as Cadasta. These help users toprove ownership of their land and resolvedisputes, rather than having to go to a bu-reaucrat’s office.

A crucial lesson of the past few decades,however, is that if land reform is treatedpurely as a top-down technical task, it willnot work well. It is not enough simply tomap and register a property, as severalhigh-profile efforts show. In Ethiopia, after20m certificates were issued in the 2000s,land records were rarely updated. In Ugan-da a project to digitise records has strug-gled with a lack of data. Even Rwanda’sscheme has had teething problems.Though land administration is workingwell in Rwandan cities, 87% of rural tran-sactions remain informal (mostly becausethe cost of registering sales is too high).

In sub-Saharan Africa formal titleseems to bring less additional security oftenure than it does in other parts of theworld. In July Prindex published results ofa 140-country survey on how secure peoplefeel in their properties (see map on left). Itfound that there was only a small differ-ence in perceived security between sub-Sa-haran Africans with formal documenta-tion (70%) and those without (65%). Thiswas the lowest gap anywhere.

The authors suggest this may be furtherevidence of what researchers call the “Afri-ca effect”. Titling also seems to make lessdifference to productivity in Africa than inAsia or the Americas. A paper co-authoredby Steven Lawry of the Centre for Interna-tional Forestry Research found that agri-cultural productivity increased by no morethan 10% in the African studies they re-viewed, compared with 50-100% in the pa-

Kampala

Freehold Leasehold

CustomaryNo formal titles.Ownershiprights hardto upgrade

MailoDual ownershipinvolving bothlandlord andtenant

Greater Kampala, land tenure system, 2016

U G A N D A

Source: World BankLake Victoria

15 km

KENYA

UGANDA

TANZANIA

Kampala

A patchwork of property rights

Rwanda

South Africa

Ethiopia

Ghana

MalawiTanzania

Kenya

Zambia

10 20 30 402 48

No data

Lost propertyAdults who believe it likely or very likely that they will be evictedfrom their land or property in the next five years, 2018-19, %

Source: Prindex

Issue Date: 12-09-2020 Zone: EUDE Desk: MidEastAfrica Output on: 10-09-2020----09:18 Page: MA2 Revision: 0

Eprinted and posted with permission to Bitprop from The EconomistSeptember © 2020 The Economist Newspaper Ltd.

The Economist September 12th 2020 Middle East & Africa 33

2 pers from Latin America and Asia—partlybecause successful efforts in other regionswere more efficient and pursued titlingalongside other reforms.

Another explanation for the Africa ef-fect is that customary systems offer moresecurity than was previously assumed.These arrangements, which cover perhaps625m people and 78% of Africa’s land, varyhugely in how they combine collectiveownership with rights of individuals orfamilies. Yet over the past 30 years therehas been what Admos Chimhowu of theUniversity of Manchester calls a “quietparadigm shift” in customary land laws.

Since 1990, 39 of Africa’s 54 countrieshave passed laws overhauling communalland rights. Most create something of amiddle ground between the individualisticfreehold systems popular in the West andthe colonial customary model where occu-pants had no formal rights to the land onwhich they lived and worked. Mr Chim-howu characterises the “old” customarysystem as one that did not recognise prop-erty at all, where power was vested in chiefsand where markets were absent or infor-mal. In the “new” customary tenure, com-munal rights are recognised as property,local leaders are more accountable andthere are greater links with formal mar-kets. This, at least, is the theory.

Solving the chief problemIn reality the potential of new laws, likethat of titling efforts, has been underminedby vested interests. Control of land rights isso lucrative that Africa’s ruling parties andtraditional authorities are reluctant to let itgo. “Traditional leaders balk at surrender-ing what is...colonially encouraged owner-ship over their citizens’ lands,” notes LizAlden Wily, an expert on land and custom-ary law. In countries such as Ghana, Mala-wi, Namibia and Zambia, chiefs have sty-mied new laws that would have reducedtheir power to allocate land.

Since the end of apartheid in South Afri-ca, successive laws have given “traditional”authorities more clout. The 35-40% of peo-ple who live in the former “homelands”created under white rule, or other commu-nal areas, are unable to own their land.Black South Africans can now buy propertyoutside the homelands, but inside themthey remain, in effect, subjects.

Several studies have found that chiefs,in cahoots with politicians, use their pow-ers to sell land to mining or other firmswithout the say-so of their people. In 2016South Africa’s public protector, a legal om-budsman, found that the leaders of theBapo ba Mogale people of North West prov-ince, who live on platinum-rich land, hadsomehow lost 800m rand that was sup-posed to belong to their people. Activistswho raised the issue were beaten up.

A process that was meant to correct

some of the injustices of apartheid has in-stead been hijacked by corrupt elites. Landrestitution schemes are “captured” bythose who have access to money and con-nections, according to a study of 62 landprojects by the Institute for Poverty, Landand Agrarian Studies, an academic group.

Another way in which African bigwigsexert power over land, to the detriment ofordinary citizens, is what Ms Wily calls“state landlordism”. This can take severalforms. Some bigwigs abuse the process ofmapping communities to grab the choicestsurrounding land for agri-businesses, as inTanzania. Some take an expansive inter-pretation of the state’s power to seize landin the “public interest”. In Kenya a lawpassed in 2012 was supposed to reduce thepolitical power of the ministry of lands bysetting up an apolitical land commission.But vested interests have eroded its author-ity and land grabs have increased over thepast eight years. The designation of dozensof protected forests has frequently servedto deprive indigenous people of their land.

State landlordism is an urban problem,too, especially as cities have grown to en-compass erstwhile farmland. A report pub-lished in 2019 by enact, a research groupfunded by the eu, suggested that drug-traf-fickers are small fry compared with crimi-nal landlords. “Land allocation, real estateand property development”, it wrote, “maybe the largest type of organised criminalactivity in Africa”.

In Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, more than90% of residents rent their homes from ab-sentee landlords. enact cites a survey esti-mating that 42% of these landlords “reput-edly had associations with state andpolitical actors”, while 41% were govern-ment officials and 16% were politicians. InGhana there is a similar pattern, where ur-ban land ownership is dominated by statebodies, political leaders and chiefs.

Those who benefit from a murky statusquo can also take advantage of archaic

planning laws. In former British coloniesmany cities are governed by laws influ-enced by the uk Town and Country Plan-ning Act of 1947, which was not designedfor dense Kenyan slums. This is one reasonwhy English-speaking cities have moresprawl than French-speaking ones. Frenchplanners were generally keener on com-pact, dense cities, while English-speakingcities have 50% more patches of built-uponland with no surrounding developments.

Despite state landlordism, promisingreforms continue. Land-rights lawyers arecampaigning for governments to obeytheir own laws. Rwanda is trying to reversethe slide into informalisation. In Ethiopiaseveral states are issuing certificates thatallow people to formally rent out their landand to borrow against it.

The pandemic has made everythingharder. Titling has slowed in Ethiopia. It ishard to gather around a map or a smart-phone if you are meant to be social distanc-ing. Courts that are not sitting cannot re-solve disputes. Elsewhere covid-19 hasunderlined the fragility of many Africans’land rights. Women are at risk, especiallythose whose husbands or fathers havedied. There is some evidence that in Kenyawidows were thrown out of their homes bytheir in-laws during lockdown, as they areseen as a burden.

Back in Khayelitsha, a few miles fromMs Qasingo’s house, is a reminder of howthe pandemic and a lack of property rightscombine to make people’s lives insecure.On the same day your correspondent metMs Qasingo, scores of people left destituteby the pandemic set up shacks on state-owned land. Many had been evicted fromtheir previous abodes; their jobs gone be-cause of covid-19. Their new homes couldbe bulldozed at the click of an official’s fin-gers. It would be tragic if one legacy of apandemic that forced billions to stay intheir homes was that it made it harder forothers to keep theirs. 7

Where’s Wally’s?

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