the politics of land reforms in malawi: the case of the community based rural land development...

Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 23, 380–393 (2011)

Published online in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.1776

THE POLITICS OF LAND REFORMS INMALAWI: THE CASE OF THE COMMUNITY

BASED RURAL LAND DEVELOPMENTPROGRAMME (CBRLDP)

BLESSINGS CHINSINGA*

University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi

Abstract: The implementation experiences of the CBRLDP demonstrate that the design,

reform and implementation of pro-poor institutional arrangements are not merely a technical

or managerial matter but a profoundly political exercise. This is underscored by the sheer

determination of stakeholders engaged with the CBRLDP to shift the burden of the reforms

elsewhere by taking recourse mainly to informal institutions within the framework of the

evolving institutional arrangements governing land ownership and use. In addition, the

question of citizenship based on the notion of autochthony is invoked by communities with

excess land to the extent that new settlers have to contend with the constant threat that their

land is open to contestation by the natives. The main argument of this paper therefore is that

these experiences have greatly undermined the prospects of the CBRLDP to generate valuable

lessons as a potential blueprint for sustainable land reform across the country and for further

fine-tuning the draft land legislative framework. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: land; land reform; institutions; pro-poor and politics

1 INTRODUCTION

This paper explores the politics of land reforms in Malawi through the lens of a World

Bank sponsored Community Based Rural Land Development Programme (CBRLDP)

launched in 2004. The CBRLDP stands out as a major initiative to deal with the question

of land in Malawi since the 1967 post independence land reforms. It is a pilot initiative

that involves purchasing and redistributing land to farmers on a willing buyer, willing

seller basis with the view of building on its lessons to scale up the initiative across the

*Correspondence to: Blessings Chinsinga, Department of Political and Administrative Studies, ChancellorCollege, University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi. E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Politics of Land Reforms in Malawi 381

country (GoM, 2005). The land question remains a topical issue because the 1967

land reforms did not represent any significant break with the past but rather reflected

almost wholesale continuity with the colonial framework governing land tenure patterns

and ownership (Ng’ong’ola, 1982; Kanyongolo, 2005). The combined effects of the

postcolonial development strategy and the rapid increase in population growth have led

to the dramatic decline in per capita landholding sizes to as low as 0.8 ha in the 2000s

from 1.53 ha in the late 1960s (Chirwa, 2004). The land at the disposal of the majority of

the smallholder farmers is described as ‘simply providing a cushion or safety net that will

provide them with a base while their primary incomes need to be generated elsewhere’

(Smith, 1999: p. 8).

While the question of land received a new lease of life in the lead up to the political

transition from an authoritarian one party regime to a multiparty democracy in May 1994,

very little progress has been made to date (Peters and Kambewa, 2007). When the United

Democratic Front (UDF) succeeded the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) at the helm of

government in the May 1994 founding democratic elections, it constituted a Presidential

Commission of Inquiry on Land Reform in 1996. The mandate of the commission was to

‘to promote scholarly discourse, gather the opinion of the private sector, ordinary citizens

and non-governmental organisations and to organise their findings in such a manner as to

aid the land policy efforts’ (GoM, 1999: p. 13). The commission produced its final report in

1999, which formed the basis for developing a national land policy which was approved by

Cabinet in July 2002. A Special Law Commission was empanelled in 2003, tasked to

review existing land legislation and develop new legislation for effective land

administration by consulting as widely as possible with relevant stakeholders. The

enabling legislative framework for the land policy is yet to be promulgated into law much

as the Special Law Commission wound up its assignment more than 6 years ago.

The main argument of this paper is that the CBRLDP experiences have greatly

undermined the prospects of it generating valuable lessons as a potential blueprint for

sustainable land reform across the country and for further fine-tuning the draft land

legislative framework. This is mainly attributed to the politics resulting from the interface

between formal and informal institutions in the course of implementation of the CBRLDP.

The implementation of the CBRLDP has not proceeded as designed because stakeholders,

especially at the community level in both sending and receiving districts, have strategically

exploited the programme to advance their own selfish interests. Communities in the

receiving districts have exploited historical developments to reassert their claims over their

ancestral land alienated from them during colonial and postcolonial eras; traditional

leaders and community oversight committees (CoCs) have exploited the CBRLDP as a

source of rent; and traditional leaders in receiving districts have seized the CBRLDP as an

opportunity to contest any perceived modification in their authority as implied in the new

land policy mainly through disregarding their quasi-judicial role in land matters involving

settlers and natives. These constraints generally illustrate that the design, reform and

implementation of pro-poor institutional arrangements are not a politically neutral

exercise. They are driven, influenced and shaped by political processes resulting from the

interaction and contestation of diverse interests and from differing forms and degrees of

power, licit and illicit, formal and informal which play a key role in determining final

outcomes (Leftwich, 2006; Musembi, 2007).

This paper is based on a study that was carried out in Machinga district among both

beneficiaries of the CBRLDP and the local residents in seven new settlements. The study

adopted an entirely qualitative approach which focused on the reactions, comments and

Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 23, 380–393 (2011)

DOI: 10.1002/jid

382 B. Chinsinga

perceptions of participants rather than quantification in the collection and analysis of data.

This approach yields spoken words, opinions and expressions that are of greater value

when analysing social contexts and institutions (Bryman, 2001; Campbell, 2002). The

main tools for data collection were key informant interviews which were held with

the CBRLDP staff, traditional leaders and the leadership of the new settlers; focus group

discussions (FGDs) which were held with communities both new and old; and a few in

depth individual interviews to follow up on specific issues that emerged in the FGDs. A

total of ten FGDs, ten key informant interviews and ten in depth interviews were held. The

FGDs were complemented by four individual case studies. These data collection

techniques were complemented by secondary data sources, especially the CBRLDP design

documents and evaluation reports to date.

2 THE EMPIRICAL CONTEXT OF THE LAND QUESTION IN MALAWI

Land is the most significant productive asset for the majority of Malawians yet it is far from

being equitably distributed. It is estimated that up to 84 per cent Malawians eke their

livelihoods directly out of agriculture which contributes over 90 per cent to the country’s

export earnings and about 39 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and

accounts for 85 per cent of total employment. Access to land is therefore quite vital for

sustainable livelihoods in Malawi even though the majority of the smallholder farmers,

estimated at 70 per cent, do not fully depend on it for their subsistence since they cultivate

less than a hectare (Ellis et al., 2003). Land is nonetheless a significant determinant of

whether a household will be food secure, less vulnerable to risks and shocks and earn a

livelihood above the poverty line.

Land ownership and distribution is highly unequal in Malawi. It is, for instance,

estimated that one in every three smallholder farmers cultivate between 0.5 and 1 ha of

land; 55 per cent of smallholders have less than 1 ha of land and that 70 per cent of

smallholder farmers cultivate less than a hectare and devote 70 per cent of the land to

maize, the main staple (Chirwa, 2004; Chinsinga, 2008). Average landholding sizes for

poor and non-poor households are 0.91 and 1.9 ha, respectively. Less than 5 per cent of the

smallholder farmers cultivate more than 3 ha. It is further estimated that between 1.8 and

2 million smallholder farmers cultivate on average 1 ha where as 30 000 estates cultivate

10–500 ha (Kanyongolo, 2005). There are striking regional variations in the patterns of

land distribution in Malawi with the southern region where the CBRLDP is being piloted

the hardest hit.1 The average land holding sizes per capita are estimated at 0.178 ha in the

south compared to 0.257 and 0.256 ha for central and northern regions, respectively.

The current patterns of land distribution can be attributed to the postcolonial land

policies which instead of addressing the iniquities and injustices of the colonial era simply

reinforced them. While some reforms were implemented, they did not ‘herald a

transformation of Malawi’s political economy, but largely retained colonial land policies

and laws’ (Kanyongolo, 2005: p. 127). The gist of this argument is that these reforms

essentially maintained the colonial land classification scheme even though attempts were

made to alter actual designations. It is thus argued that the new designations introduced by

the postcolonial land reforms ‘did not represent real change in the previous [colonial]

categorisation and these changes were just changes in name’ (Sahn and Arulpragasm,

1991: p. 1). These reforms did not only institute mechanisms for converting customary land

1Malawi is divided into three administrative regions, namely: north, centre and south.


DOI: 10.1002/jid


into private land but also reinforced the postcolonial dual agricultural strategy that

distinguished estate farming from smallholder agriculture (Chirwa, 2004; Chinsinga,

2008). Perhaps more critically important is the fact that the land market that was created

following the 1967 laws provided only for one-way transferability of land. Land could only

be transferred to the estate sector, usually with only a modest compensation.

The resurgence of the land question onto the government’s agenda is closely linked to

the democratisation project at the turn of the 1990s. The advocates of the multiparty

political dispensation argued that embracing the political transition offered opportunities to

address a whole range of inequities and injustices perpetrated by the one party regime

paramount of which being inequitable land redistribution patterns (Kanyongolo, 2005;

Chinsinga, 2008). The question of land reform was generally flagged as an immediate

course of action to address the problem of poverty should Malawians choose to embrace a

democratic political dispensation. The country has therefore witnessed a proliferation of

poverty reduction interventions since the mid 1990s in addition to the constitution of the

Presidential Commission on Land Inquiry in 1996.

The Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (MPRSP) and the Malawi Growth and

Development Strategy (MGDS) deserve further elaboration in relation to the land question.

The MPRSP was described as the basis for all government policy and planning activities

for development while the MGDS, as the successor to MPRSP, is described as an

overarching policy direction for wealth creation and economic growth as a means of

reducing poverty on a sustainable basis by transforming the country from a predominantly

importing and consuming to a producing and exporting one (Chinsinga, 2008). But despite

being the overarching frameworks for guiding the country’s strategic directions for

development, both the MPRSP and MGDS have strikingly shied away from addressing the

land question in a decisive manner. And yet both documents fully acknowledge that land in

Malawi remains the most critical productive resource and without any major reforms in the

land tenure patterns, poverty reduction initiatives are highly unlikely to deliver their

intended strategic impact (Chirwa, 2004).

The origins of the CBRLDP can be traced back to the findings of the Presidential

Commission on Land Inquiry which completed its work in 1999. The findings of the

commission were further supported by various specific land utilisation studies supported

by development partners such as EU, DFID, USAID and the World Bank (GoM, 2005).

These studies established the availability of underutilised cultivable arable land to the tune

of 2.6 million hectares which could be targeted for redistribution through a carefully

conceived land reform programme. This culminated in the conception of the Malawi Land

Reform Programme (MLRP) of which the CBRLDP is a pilot initiative.

Funded to the tune of 29 US$ million, the CBRLDP is a World Bank sponsored land

redistribution programme being implemented in Thyolo and Mulanje as sending districts

and Machinga and Mangochi as receiving districts. The main objective of the CBRLDP is

to increase the incomes of about 15 000 poor rural families in the four pilot districts by

providing land to the landless and land poor. The beneficiaries of the programme self-select

each other into groups of 10–35 households (trusts) to seek relocation from the sending to

receiving districts. These groups are screened to certify their eligibility according to the

programme guidelines by Community Oversight Committees (CoCs). In the host

communities, the CoCs facilitate the integration of the new settlers into their respective

new communities. The eligible households must be Malawian, landless or near landless,

facing food insecurity and once they qualify as beneficiaries they must give up ownership

of their land in the sending districts (GoM, 2005; Chirwa, 2008).


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384 B. Chinsinga

The CBRLDP uses a market assisted willing seller, willing buyer community-driven

decentralised system of land acquisition in which beneficiaries actively participate in

identification of land for purchase and enter into initial negotiations with the potential

seller on the basis of a price range set by the CBRLDP staff and District Assembly officials

in the receiving districts (GoM, 2005). Following successful conclusion of the transactions

the beneficiaries are ready to relocate to their new piece of land. Each beneficiary receives a

uniform grant of US$ 1050 for land administration and farm development, with 30 per cent

devoted to land acquisition, 10 per cent to cover settlement costs and 60 per cent meant for

farm development (Chirwa, 2008). This grant is provided in the first year of resettlement

and households have to find their own resources in subsequent years of developing the land.

The beneficiaries are vested with group ownership rights but with the option that

individual households can title their pieces of land as long as they are able to meet the costs.

The CBDRLD implementation manual states that ‘beneficiaries will decide the property

regime under which they will hold the land (leasehold, freehold or customary estate)’

(GoM, 2005: p. 4). It is further stated that the landholders will not be allowed to dispose of

the land in the first 5 years and will not be allowed to sub-divide it below 2 ha (Chirwa,

2004; GoM, 2005).

3 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: INSTITUTIONS, GROWTHAND CHANGE

Institutions are popularly defined as the rules of the game (North, 1990). In developing

countries, institutions governing land use and ownership patterns are considered

particularly critical for pro-poor economic growth since land is widely acknowledged

as a primary productive resource. Broadly speaking, institutions are durable social rules

and procedures, formal or informal, which structure the social, economic, and political

relations and interactions of those affected by them. They forbid some forms of behaviour

and encourage others and the form which such rules take may either hinder or promote

growth (Leftwich, 2006).

It is therefore not surprising that land reform features prominently in most developing

countries as the main strategy for bringing about sustainable livelihoods among the vast

majority of the poor people (Kariuki, 2009). Land reforms are justified mainly on the basis

of the history of social justice and exclusion perpetrated by both colonial and postcolonial

regimes. They either take the form of land redistribution or tenure reform. It does not,

however, matter whether it is land redistribution or tenure reform, the politics of land

reform have become much more complex in the wake of the dominance of the neoliberal

orthodoxy (Sjaastad and Bromely, 1997). The ultimate results are essentially the same.

Fundamental reforms shifts of assets and in terms of opportunities in favour of the poor are

yet to be brought about (Lahiff, 2003).

The market based approach has been strategically exploited by elites to mean ‘piecemeal

distribution, securing benefits for a lucky few but leaving the fundamental structures of the

agrarian economy, and the problems of mass rural poverty and landless largely intact’

(Lahiff, 2003: p. 52). The pace of land reform is slowed down by the abstract

conceptualisation of the market-land for the landless will be supplied by the market,

beneficiaries will be selected on the basis of their ability to produce for the market, support

services will be accessed through the market-when, in fact, it is a pretext to safeguard the

interests of the privileged few.


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Most land reforms prioritise land rights reforms. This is justified on the basis that

indigenous land tenure is insecure hence leads to suboptimal investment incentives

(Sjaastad and Bromely, 1997). This is regardless of the fact that empirical evidence

demonstrates that indigenous tenure may provide equal or higher investment incentives

than private rights that are productive rather than wasteful. The skewed focus on land rights

reforms runs counter to the main goal of the land reforms which is to redistribute assets to

the poor as opposed to new established middle class or corporations.

The disproportionate focus on land rights reforms conceals the deeper underlying

politics of land reforms. The argument is that often the discourse of land rights reforms

features in contexts where the indigenous land rights face little or no contestation. Land

rights reforms are favoured because they fit with a particular neoliberal view of

development even though there is sparse evidence that institutional fix of tenure would

address the problems of shortages of markets, lack of access to credit and investment

(Bernstein, 2002). However, critical analysis reveals that the major beneficiaries of land

rights reform are rarely the poor but rather the privileged elites. The formalisation of

customary land rights brings the peasants into the fold of the market which unlocks

‘opportunities for accumulation mainly from above’ (Lahiff, 2003: p. 54). Even in the case

of Zimbabwe, which stands out as a radical land redistribution initiative, there is no

suggestion of alternative to the dominant neoliberal orthodoxy. In short, the land question

continues to be shaped by a history of dispossession, exclusion and exploitation.

It is against this backdrop that the experiences of land reforms across the African

continent demonstrate that promoting and facilitating pro-poor institutional change is not

an easy task. It is, in fact, argued that that land tenure is not just a matter of changing rules

but of implementing those rules, which requires reorganisation and reorientation of

existing land administration institutions. This is the case because institutional change is a

deeply imbued political process that involves winners and losers (Harris, 2006; Leftwich,

2007). There are thus bound to be winners and losers in the course of establishing or

changing institutions because any existing institutional arrangements are not neutral; they

distribute advantage to some and disadvantage to others. Consequently institutional change

is often heavily contested by diverse interests with different forms and degrees of power,

influence and authority, creating in the process winners and losers. It is, therefore, argued

that handling and managing institutional changes ‘is not simply a technical or managerial

matter but a profoundly political one’ (Leftwich and Hogg, 2007: p. 12).

This is not unexpected becausewhen formal changes are introduced they do not just drop

into a regulatory vacuum; they are often grafted onto a dynamic social setting where local

practices are continually adapting to accommodate competing and changing relations

especially around property. With particular reference to the introduction of formal land

titles, Musembi (2007) observes that social institutions such as family networks and locally

based dispute resolution processes play a much more central and immediate role in day-to-

day interaction over land matters. He argues that these informal rules and the concomitant

expectations they produce become the immediate points of reference in people’s land

relations, more often than not relegating the formal laws and institutions to a marginal role,

or modifying them to suit the reality of their lives. His conclusion is that ‘the context and

shape of formal title varies with the local context and can be very different from what the

officials or proponents of formalisation have in mind’ (Musembi, 2007: p. 1462).

Land reform experiences in Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe, for instance,

demonstrate that dramatic institutional changes are quite rare because changing

institutional arrangements is quite a difficult task once they have been established. The


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386 B. Chinsinga

track record of land reforms in these countries has been rather disappointing both in terms

of meeting targets and creating sustainable livelihood impact. The land reforms in Kenya

date back to the early 1950s but acute unequal land distribution still persist. The 2008

National Land Policy proposes to bring to an end the land tenure conversions since by the

2001 estimates; only 6 per cent of total Kenyan land had been registered (Kariuki, 2009). In

South Africa, land reform was projected as the cornerstone of the African National

Congress’s (ANC) Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The goal was to

transfer 30 per cent of agricultural land within the first 5 years but by 1999 only 1 per cent

of the land had been transferred. The target shifted to transfer 30 per cent of agricultural

land by 2015 but as of June 2008 only 5 per cent had been distributed (Lahiff, 2007;

Kariuki, 2009). Progress in Zimbabwe’s land reform was greatly constrained by the

Lancaster House constitutional agreements which clearly protected the interests of the

settlers. The target was to settle 162 000 households on about 9 million hectares of land by

1984. But by 2000, only 75 000 households had been settled. However, Zimbabwe

managed to redistribute 11 million hectares within 3 years under the fast track land reform

programme which has been characterised as ‘the largest property transfer ever to occur in

peace time’ (Kariuki, 2009: p. 14). This was accomplished with considerable chaos,

disorder and violence, however.

These experiences further demonstrate that social, economic and political contexts

matter a great deal in determining the success or failure of institutional reforms. This is

underscored in Musembi’s (2007) emphasis on the role of informal institutions in

determining final outcomes of institutional changes. It is, however, argued as shown in the

cases of Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe that in moments of critical junctures for

change, path dependent legacies from a previous era can suffocate change especially when

critical junctures have created interests that would resist change. A caveat, however, is in

order here. Awareness of historical path dependence must be balanced by the recognition of

the possibilities for human agency as, for instance, demonstrated in the case of Zimbabwe

to bring about far reaching change triggered either endogenously or exogenously (Harris,

2006; Leftwich, 2006).

4 THE POLITICS OF THE CBRLDP IN PERSPECTIVE

4.1 Achievements of the CBRLDP Project

The CBRLDP’s target was to relocate 15 000 families between 2004 and 2009. Supported

by District Commissioners’ offices in both sending and receiving districts, the

identification of beneficiaries was carried out on the basis of the targeting criteria

outlined in Section 2. Prior to the beneficiary identification exercise, the programme was

widely advertised to the target areas and in addition to potential beneficiaries being

sensitised through community level meetings facilitated by CBRLDP staff. Nevertheless,

by the time of the review in November 2007, the project was far behind its own targets. The

plan was to ‘to relocate 1000 beneficiaries by end of year one but none was resettled;

3000 households in year two but only 400 were relocated; and 5000 in year three but only

2400 households were resettled’.2 Project staff attributed the slow progress to ‘delays in the

2Interview with a CBRLDP officer in Mangochi.


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approval of the CBRLDP implementation plan; mobilisation of human and material

resources; scepticism of estate owners; and sustained misconceptions about the project’.3

One of the misconceptions about the project predominantly perpetrated in sending

communities was that ‘CBRLDP beneficiaries would be sold to the ‘‘Chinese’’ because

there is no way government can offer people land for free’.4 However, this misconception

underlies the potency of informal institutions to undermine reforms of this nature. It was

argued that this misconception was specially perpetrated by traditional leaders in sending

districts ‘who feared that massive enrolment onto the programme by their subjects would

greatly undermine the stature of their rulership as one of the old adage says ‘‘village is

people’’’.5 This underscores that institutional change processes are not neutral; there are

winners and losers in which case traditional leaders as potential losers were fighting back

by perpetrating this particular myth.

These challenges notwithstanding, the CBRLDP project has enabled the landless or near

landless both from sending and within receiving districts to acquire land at least adequate

for cultivation of food to last them throughout the year with considerable surplus for sale.

From settlement to settlement beneficiaries claimed that ‘they were no longer sleeping on

empty stomachs because they were able to cultivate more than just enough for purposes of

subsistence’.6 According to Chirwa (2008), the average maize production among

beneficiary households increased from 200 kg before resettlement to 1454 kg after the

project in 2005/2006 and yields were significantly higher after the project (2269 kg/ha)

compared to 962 kg/ha before the project.

The main concern, however, is whether the experience of improved livelihoods will be

sustained beyond the first year of the project. Most areas lack markets for the settlers to

dispose of their produce at a profit to help them procure inputs for the subsequent farming

seasons. Settlers had to dispose of their produce at extremely low prices including in those

areas where the government had made efforts to provide access to better markets. For

instance, some settlers observed ‘we sold a 50 kg bag of maize at MK500 (about US$ 3.50)

because of lack of markets; honestly speaking, we let the traders steal our maize’.7

The prospects of the positive gains of the CBRLDP collapsing after barely a year

underlie that fact that land reform is a complex exercise. It is more than just access to land;

it must be complemented by access to non-land assets, access to credit markets, access to

extension services and training of beneficiaries in modern farming techniques (Chirwa,

2004). The CBRLDP staff actually acknowledged that ‘the provision of complementary

services was overlooked in the in initial programme design but on the basis of the

experiences of the first group of settlers efforts were made to work with NGOs to help

settlers access basic services but this has not been very successful’.8

The rather bleak prospects for sustainability are further backed up by the econometric

analysis by Chirwa (2008) of the impact of the CBRLDP on investment, food production

and agricultural productivity. His analysis shows that the positive effects of the programme

are much more due to access to financial resources provided under the package of

assistance in the first season than change in land tenure per se. New beneficiaries with only

3Interview with a CBRLDP officer in Mangochi.4Interview with a CBRLDP officer in Mangochi.5Interview with CBRLDP’s Sociological Consultant.6FGD with men from Chimbeta Trust.7FGD with women from Itendo Trust.8Interview with a CBRLDP officer in Mangochi.


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388 B. Chinsinga

one season of farming under the programme tend to invest more in hybrid maize and are

more productive than those that have been under the programme for two seasons or more.

4.2 CDRLDP Capture by Elites

There is evidence that local elites (chiefs, village headmen and CoC leaders) have captured

the programme by steering its implementation in manner that largely benefits them and

their allies both in the sending and receiving communities. The local elites have in different

ways appropriated the CBRLDP as an instrument of patronage to achieve selfish goals at

the expense of the underlying goals of the project as expressed in the design documents.

The CBRLDP has become highly susceptible to capture by the elites because of the

provision of the resettlement grant to the successful beneficiary groups. At 1050 US$ per

household, the resettlement allowance is a huge sum of money by Malawian standards,

where GNP per capita has stagnated at less than 200 US$ for the last decade (Chinsinga,

2008). The selection of CoC members was not transparent enough to the extent that CoCs

in most communities were described as ‘more or less extensions of chieftaincy as more

than half of the participants were drawn from the royal families as a means of strategically

manipulating the selection exercise’.9 Several cases were reported of CoC members

prioritising their family and friends as beneficiaries of the CBDRLD at the expense of

households genuinely in need of land. The majority of the non-family and friend

beneficiaries ‘had to bribe CoC members to find their way into the programme’.10 Most

CoCs were asking potential beneficiaries to pay up to MK 2000 (about US$ 20) as a

qualification fee which appears relatively small to the overall benefits from the programme

but which is quite a huge sum of money for a typical resident in rural Malawi.

The elite capture of the CBRLDP is affecting implementation in two main ways. First, it

is not easy to enforce some of the programme guidelines because of the clientelistic

selection of the beneficiaries of the programme. Some beneficiaries, for instance, are

effectively operating between two areas without losing one of the pieces of land as

indicated in the project document. This was particularly the case with ‘beneficiaries having

connections to CoCs and chiefs whose main objective was simply to benefit from the

resettlement grant’;11 and ‘those beneficiaries that had the blessings of traditional leaders

as a strategy of fighting back the potential loss of their rulership stature’.12 Second, an

increase in number of households are immigrating back to their areas of origin immediately

after the resettlement grant runs out. While some are forced to return back to their homes

for genuine reasons, the majority of these households are those who did not desperately

need the land but ‘were basically those that were pushed into the programme merely to

benefit from the resettlement grant as they did not have serious land problems in the first

place’.13

The main challenge of implementing programmes of this nature is that they seldom

address the plight of the intended beneficiaries and quite often get captured by gatekeepers

who speak for, but not with, those they claim to represent. This is an example of a case in

which the interaction between formal and informal institutions produce unintended affects

9FGD with men from Chitimbe Trust and Women from Chimbeta Trust.10FGD with women from Itendo Trust.11FGD with men from Chimbabvi Trust.12FGD with men from Kalunga Trust.13FGD with non-beneficiaries surrounding Chitimbe Trust.


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which often than not undermine the attainment of the formally stipulated outcomes

(Helmke and Levitsky, 2004). The main target beneficiaries for the CBRLDP were the

landless or the near landless grappling with problems of chronic food insecurity yet these

were not prioritised due to elite capture of the project.

4.3 Protests to the CBRLDP Land Reform Programme

The CBRLDP is experiencing both overt and covert forms of protest in receiving

communities. The overt forms of protest, perpetrated by the ordinary people, are

manifested in different kinds of land disputes. The disputes have taken the form of property

rights, encroachment on land appropriated by new settlers and invasions of seemingly idle

estates. Traditional leaders are engaging in covert forms of protest by abdicating their

quasi-judicial role in land disputes involving settlers. The case study below illustrates the

experiences of one of the CBRLDP beneficiaries with land encroachment as well as covert

abdication of traditional leaders’ quasi-judicial role in land matters.

I arrived here in 2005. I quickly settled down and started working on my land hoping

to make the most out of my new found life. However, a few weeks later, problems

began. I woke up to find out that ten of my ridges had been planted to sweet potatoes.

When I inquired about the incident, I was told that it was the rightful owner of the

land that had planted the sweet potatoes. He argues that the estate owner had cheated

about the exact boundaries of the land. We have taken the case to the village

headman, group village headman and even the traditional authority but they have not

really helped. I complained to the CBRLDP staff but they indicated that they cannot

do anything as long as the chiefs are not cooperative. The person who has encroached

on my land argues that he cannot get out of the land because it belongs to his grand

parents and no one else apart from him is the rightful heir. He emphasises that it does

not make sense for the programme to offer land to strangers when the appetite for

land for the owners of the soil is not yet satisfied.

Source: Fieldwork, November 2007.

Firstly, the case study demonstrates that there is a marked divergence of the land reform

discourse between the official policy and the popular view at the grassroots. The

communities’ conception of a fair and just land reform programme is that it should

champion restitution instead of people from other districts being prioritised as

beneficiaries of the initiative. Their argument is that the land that was taken away from

them by colonialists and through the aegis of postcolonial legislative instruments should

simply be given back to them and not strangers (Chirwa, 2004). Secondly, traditional

leaders are less willing to get involved with the affairs of the CBRLDP beneficiaries who

are described ‘as government’s people and by implication the government has to deal

with their problems’.14 It is argued that traditional leaders are less receptive to the

settlers because their arrival affects the streams of external benefits to their villages and

also ‘signals government’s determination to implement the new land policy which

greatly diminishes the authority of traditional leaders over land matters’.15 Government

is running a number of social protection programmes including the famous fertiliser

14Interview with a traditional leader in Mangochi district.15Interview with the sociological consultant for CBRLDP.


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390 B. Chinsinga

subsidy programme. Traditional leaders would rather have the new settlers constitute

their own villages rather than become an integral part of existing villages since this

negatively affects the magnitude of any form of external support because of increased

numbers. This illustrates how immediate social contexts shape and influence the

success or failure of programmes of this nature. The interest of traditional leaders is to

shift the burden of adjustment elsewhere and retain the statusquo in as far as their

authority over land matters is concerned since processes of institutional change and

reforms often provide a platform where different interests and ideas compete (Leftwich,

2006). The combined effect of the overt and the covert forms of protest is that it has

diminished the sense of tenure security over the CBRLDP land by the newcomers,

especially since they do not as yet have documented individual ownership of their

pieces of land. There is a great sense of fear given the way land disputes have been dealt

with hitherto. The settlers will have thus to contend with the constant threat that

their right to land is open to contestation by those with customary claims based on

the notion of autochthony (Woodhouse, 2006). This illustrates that the implementation

of the CBRLDP is being negotiated by diverse stakeholders, intent to shift the burden

of adjustment elsewhere and has invariably culminated in a disjuncture between the

intended and the actual outcomes of the CBRLDP which underpins the fact that

processes of institutional change are inherently political in nature (Hare and Davis,

2006).

4.4 CBRLDP Oversights

The key issue of concern is that the CBRLDP pilot has missed the opportunity to fully test

the robustness of the various provisions of the new land policy especially since some of

them have generated contentious and unending debates during the consultative phase of the

policy document (Chirwa, 2004). For instance, the new land policy proposes titling of

customary land as a way of enhancing security of tenure and as a means of encouraging

investment into land by owners as well as a means of transforming land into a potentially

viable form of collateral (Peters and Kambewa, 2007). However, the CBRLDP is yet to

facilitate the registration of even a single customary estate at least in the trusts included in

this study. This is contrary to the spirit of advertisements for the CBRLDP in which it was

stressed that the settlers would be given documents to serve as proof of ownership of their

land. An FGD participant, for instance, observed that ‘the radio advertisements stressed

that our pieces of land would be leased and we would be given documentation supporting

our ownership claims of pieces of land’.16 According to CBRLDP staff the delays ‘were

due to lack of capacity on the part of the project but also due to archaic techniques used’.17

At the time of the review ‘only 6738 ha of projected 33 520 ha by the end of a 5 year period

had been surveyed’.18

It was clear from the fieldwork that in the absence of any alternative guidance and

accompanying mechanisms for enforcement, the settlers will use the same inheritance

practices that they are accustomed to pertaining to land ownership such as subdividing the

land through female children once they are ready for marriage would lead to land

fragmentation as has happened in the sending districts. This is where Musembi’s argument

16FGD with men from Chitimbe Trust.17Interview with a CBRLDP officer in Mangochi.18Interview with a CBRLDP officer in Mangochi.


DOI: 10.1002/jid


is illustrative. The reforms have created a void in this regard but even if the CBRLDP had

created mechanisms of enforcement, it would not have been necessarily automatic that

those prescriptions would have been followed. The prescriptions would have been

subjected to negotiations within the framework of communities’ existing milieu in which

informal norms, practices and procedures almost always play a critical role in determining

final outcomes.

The CBRLDPwould have also provided an opportunity to test the capacity of the district

and sub-district participatory structures outlined in the new land policy to mediate land

transactions. Evidence from pilots of similar nature from elsewhere across the continent

suggests that developing this capacity is a huge challenge. Often the central land registers

quickly become out of date as there is insufficient funding for staff capacity to ensure that

land transfers are notified to the central register (Woodhouse, 2006).

5 CONCLUDING REMARKS

The implementation of a land reform programme is indeed imperative given the colonial

and postcolonial injustices that have underpinned the land tenure and ownership patterns in

Malawi. The current pattern of land ownership is skewed in favour of a small minority who

accumulated vast tracts of land under the auspices of the colonial and postcolonial

legislative instruments. The vast majority of the people were disenfranchised of ownership

of their land and for a period of nearly four decades no substantive efforts have been

undertaken to redress these historical inequities. The paradox is that much of this land is

either idle or grossly underutilised.

This case study demonstrates that promoting pro-poor growth and development is a

complex exercise. In particular, the CBRLDP experiences underscore the fact that success

in promoting pro-poor growth and development is not merely a matter of conjuring good

institutions as their design and implementation critically depends on agents and agencies to

implement them (Thelen, 2004; Harris, 2006). The actions of stakeholders involved shape

and often undermine institutional arrangements meant to facilitate implementation of

programmes of this nature. For instance, communities in the receiving districts have

exploited historical developments to reassert claims over their ancestral land alienated

from them during the colonial and postcolonial eras; traditional leaders and CoC members

have exploited the CBRLDP as a source of rent; and traditional leaders in receiving

districts have seized the CBDRLDP as an opportunity to contest any perceived

modification in their authority over land as implied by the new land policy by neglecting

their quasi-judicial role over land matters involving the new settlers.

These unintended effects are inevitable since in any institutional reforms there are bound

to be winners and losers, and rarely do stakeholders accept to lose without a fight. In the

case of land reforms, social institutions such as family networks, history, chieftaincy and

locally based dispute resolution process may be much more important than the formal land

laws. As Musembi (2007) argues these are often marginalised or modified to suit the

context in which the reforms are being implemented. It is these negotiations—foreseen and

unforeseen, legitimate and illegitimate, formal and informal, endogenous and

exogenous—that often distort the implementation process and undermine the underlying

goals as has been demonstrated in the case of the CBRLDP. It is therefore doubtful whether

the CBRLDP will generate valuable lessons across the country and for further fine-tuning

the draft land legislative framework.


DOI: 10.1002/jid

392 B. Chinsinga

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