‘Don’t give away land’

WE should stop giving away huge chunks of land to foreigners for investments but encourage investors to partner with the locals who own land in establishing businesses, says the Zambia Land Alliance (ZLA).

This is the surest way of empowering Zambians and reducing poverty in the country, the alliance has said. Speaking to the Daily Nation yesterday, ZLA chairperson Emmanuel Mutaba said the only solution to rampant land wrangles was the conclusion of the land policy development. Mr. Mutaba said for over 14 years, Zambia has been grappling with land issues due to lack of policies that effectively safeguard the interest of Zambians. “We are hoping that as a nation, we could deal with those issues with the conclusion of the land policy development process as you know that land administration in the country has been done without proper guidelines and this is because we have not had a new land policy in place. For the past 14 years, we have been trying to put one in place. “Land belongs to Zambians. We appreciate that foreigners bring investment but still we believe the 99-year lease is too much and that is why we proposed to the technical committee working on the policy to reduce it and we hear it has been reduced to 25 years. However, we also want to understand how the technical team came up with that and what their considerations were,” Mr. Mutaba said. He said the current situation where foreigners found it easy to own land for a long period of time was unfortunate and that the situation must be rectified immediately. “We believe that foreigners should not have access to owning land for such a long period of time and in terms of investments, we believe that if land is owned by Zambians, foreigners can still go into partnerships with land owners to invest because that also empowers the local people in that they may not have capital to inject into these investments but have land,” he said. Mr. Mutaba called for the establishment of a land commission to regulate land administration which should be rolled across to provinces and districts as the current centralised system allegedly created a fertile ground for corruption to blossom.