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Agriculture minister Calle Schlettwein has said the implementation of the Flexible Land Tenure Act is on schedule. Schlettwein was responding to a question during the debate on the Act during parliament last week.

The government introduced an initiative to provide land tenure security to a special category of people who have not been able to own their own piece of land.

This initiative was introduced through the Flexible Land Tenure Act of 2012, which seeks to address the vulnerability of communities who live in informal settlements in urban areas across the country.

Schlettwein said the implementation of the Flexible Land Tenure has already produced tangible results, which provided the security of tenure for people living in informal settlement.

“I wish to state that the Flexible Land Tenure System is accorded top priority, because it is what we have promised our electorates,” he said.

The minister noted that the programme is currently under review with a view to improve it and get the most possible benefits from it.

He said the ministry is pondering extending the concept to the resettlement beneficiaries, with a view to improve the tenure security and empower the resettlement farmers.

Schlettwein said the rolling out of the Act expansively to other local authorities would require an expansion of the ministry’s administrative capacity.

“We are talking about, for instance more land rights offices would be required to be established in other local authorities in order to bring services closer to the people. This would enable more land measures and registration officers to be recruited to deal with the workload of registration of titles,” he said.