Alguns apunts sobre la literatura científica

In the 20^th century, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argued that the problem of insecure land in developing countries in Africa was as a result of the nature of traditional land ownership. He said that landed asset of people in developing countries was defective because

land could not be traded or used as collateral for a loan; that is, land was dead capital. He advocated for a private property rights system in which land can be individually owned. De Soto’s persuasive modernisation theory came at a time when the Ghanaian government was convinced that the way out of poverty and underdevelopment was through secured private land titles (Soto, 2001). The government started with the drafting of the National Land Policy, whose objective was the “judicious use of the nation's land and all its natural resources by all sections of the Ghanaian society in support of various socio- economic activities undertaken in accordance with sustainable resource management principles and in maintaining viable ecosystems” (Ministry of Lands and Forestry, 1999: 6). In 2003, other land reforms like the Land Administration Programme (LAP) followed suit.

The objectives of the LAP include the institutionalisation of all public land agencies - the Survey Department, the Land Valuation Board, the Lands Commission and the Land Title Registry - under one umbrella called the New Lands Commission. A subunit of this organiza-tion will be the Customary Land Administraorganiza-tion Unit which will help establish land secretariats under the control of the chief, tindana or family head. The project also includes the harmoni-zation of land policies with constant monitoring and evaluation. The Lands Commission is also intended to be market-focused and remove government from the management of stool/skin land (Karikari, 2006). The World Bank (2011) suggested that LAP will be beneficial to Ghana in four ways; firstly, it will reduce conflicts in land ownership and land use, providing secure land titles in both rural and urban areas, facilitating socio-agricultural and industrial develop-ment. Secondly, it will reform public sector management structures and aid in land administra-tion decentralisaadministra-tion at the local level structures, with the aim of raadministra-tionalising and instituadministra-tional- institutional-ising land administration. Thirdly, it will facilitate the participation of civil society and the private sector in checking excesses of public sector management and promote transparency and self-help initiatives for growth and development. Fourthly, it will assist in street naming which would facilitate identification of businesses, and aid local councils in collecting revenue from them.

Due to the many different aid agencies donating funds for the accomplishment of the various components of the LAP, implementation of an accountable and transparent land ad-ministration program has proven difficult, because different institutions of these organisations had diverging agendas. From Table 5.3, it is clear that, while the World Bank is pushing for individual land rights and titles to land through a market-centered approach, the Department for International Development (DFID) is pushing for control of stool administration through strengthening of the customary system in place to make it more efficient (Ministry of Lands and Forestry, 1999). The involvement of varied international organization with different agen-das in a project shows clearly the idea of transnational governmentality as purported by Fer-guson and Gupta (2002). This occurs where transnational alliances are forged by activists with complex networks of international and transnational funding, as explained in Chapter 2. Here

we see clearly the interaction of the state and international organisations serve to reorient how the society is governed from a globalised /universal level, and how this plays out at the local level during implementation. Transnational governmentality legitimises the activities of the state at a globalised level and also provides spaces within which international actors can le-gitimise themselves as local and global development agents of positive change. The LAP is also a forum through which the different international organisations mentioned above, legiti-mise their ideologies and worldviews on property rights and resource access in Africa and the world.

Table 5.4: The Politics of LAP Aid

Donors Budget

Reform component supported Date of Funding harmo-nised with practiced customary land laws (includes legally

2.1 Restructuring public sector land agencies into a single agency 2.2 Decentralisation of restruc-tured single agency to the regions 3. Improving land titling registra-tion, valuation and information

9.02 grant 81% 2.3 Strengthening customary land administration through the devel-opment of publicly

08/06/2004 –

31/08/2009

Development

3.7 Piloting demarcation and reg-istration of allodial boundaries

3.7 Piloting demarcation and reg-istration of allodial boundaries 3.8 Piloting systematic land titling and registration

3.98 grant 19% 1.1 Revision of policies, laws and regulations for effective and effi-cient land

6.92 loan 92% 3.5 Land use planning and Ortho-photo Mapping

Source: compiled from DFID (2010), World Bank (2003c, 2008), MLF (2006), MASDAR (2011b)

Appiah (2012: 264) conducted interviews with Mr. Jimmy Aidoo on the accountability of chiefs in stool land administration, whereby Appiah was made to understand that:

(y)ou don’t ask ‘Are the Chiefs accountable?’, even if you are trying to use those words, the word you should use is ‘cooperation’. You have to ask, ‘Do the traditional authorities cooperate with the CLS?’… So the word is cooperation, not accountability… The word accountable, you are looking at democratic process. Some people are even saying they are not transparent. You don’t choose or use those words when you go to the Chiefs. I took the World Bank to the Asantehene and I coached them the words to use… So if you say accountable and all that, you are threading in a very dangerous territory, they won’t mind you, they will say pack your things and go.

Dr. Odame Larbi, LAP Project Director, shares the opinion of Mr. Jimmy Aidoo when he was interviewed by Appiah. He explains thus:

It is the way the traditional system is organized. You know when you go to the chiefs in their palace, in our culture when the chief sits in public and he is adjudicating any case or performing any function, he is the last person to speak, and once he speaks no one else speaks again. When the chief speaks nobody challenges him, in public; when the chief speaks nobody can tell him that he is lying, in public… Their own subjects cannot call them to account because of the way the tra-ditional institutions are organized. If you go and demand in public that the Chief should account, I am sure that before you leave that durbar grounds to your house, if you are in a village they would have burnt your house or whatever they do they would intimidate you to leave so those structures do not allow the people to demand accountability (ibid:

264)

During an interview with an anonymous officer at the Lands commission, I asked if the creation of the Customary Land Secretariat (CLS) has in any way made the chiefs more ac-countable. I was informed that, unfortunately, the CLS are not experts and lack the capacity to carry out their duties effectively. However, there has been a reduction of land litigation and double allocation, and an increase in the management of record keeping of land transactions.

He went further to give a vivid impression of chief’s allocation practice, stating:

I have always been saying that, hmmm in Ghana we are underdevel-oped because of our land tenure system. It is part of the problem. Here

is the case where there is a sitting chief. Hmmm you know, land is money and government can task land and raise a lot of money for de-velopment. An area becomes ripe for development then a chief goes in and zones the place. If we have about fifty plots, just fifty plots and you are selling each plot ten thousand Ghana Cedi multiple it and see how much money the chief can raise from these sales. You see, but he sells the land and then spends the money on himself and the im-mediate people around him, without being held accountable for how he spends the money. There is no law compelling him to account, ex-cept that one person in the family or in the palace may be he is enlight-ened he would maybe ask a question, oh where is the money? The chief himself would take so much money and then spend it with the people around him. If you go to the palace, there is somebody a child there sometimes who is unable to pay his school fees. I hope you un-derstand. If you go to Accra, It is worse what they do. He sells the land;

the next thing to do is to marry another wife. I am not saying all the chiefs are bad, some of them are good. The sad thing is that you know the money that is accrued from the sales; he does not use it for the development of the area. He would sell the land without any develop-ment and then expect the governdevelop-ment to come in to provide the infra-structure services; road, water, electricity. Do you think this is fair? Is not fair I can tell you that when you go to Accra, chiefs are getting a lot of money they are selling lands, for millions of dollars but where do these monies go…, they are not being held accountable.

Additionally, he mentioned the difficulty of junior members of the traditional institution to hold their senior colleagues accountable or the other way round. For example, during a stakeholder meeting to present our preliminary results, the paramount chief of Tamale com-plained that the traditional system in Dagbon has made it difficult for senior chiefs to hold junior chiefs accountable when administering land on behalf of the people. He said senior chiefs could only advise junior chiefs on land use and management, but cannot decide on how they should control their lands. An example of conflict between chiefs on accountability of land

‘sales’ or leases can be deduced from my respondent’s statement below:

Yeah, a sub-chief is challenging his substantive (senior) chief in court.

He is enlightened. The unfortunate thing is that he has roped the lands

commission into the case, but if you listen to them, the lands commis-sion is not the target but the senior chief is. The substantive (senior) chief has raised so much money from allocating lands and the sub-chief wants to know, where the money is. If you listen to them, that is what they are saying. The case is in court, but because the junior chief cannot sue the senior chief, he has just sued the lands commission.

He believed that in suing the lands commission, the substantive chief would be roped indirectly. This way he will not be accused of suing a senior chief. Some sub-chiefs are using this strategy to get their senior chiefs to be accountable since there are no law compelling chiefs to be accountable.

From the above direct quotes from interviewees in the field, it is clear that customary land administration is in the hands of the traditional institutions. Government land agencies were created to work alongside traditional institutions for a better land administration system, but not much has been achieved in making this system transparent. The relationships between chiefs and government land agencies have been fluid; there are sometimes cordial and other times conflictual in land administrative matters. This is because the chieftaincy institution has impunity in the courts, due their role as custodians of land or trustees for the community. They also have statutory and judicial powers to manage and administer land with little or no inter-ference constitutionally from the parliament and Government. Due to the flexibility of ‘prac-tised’ and ‘legal’ versions of customary laws chieftaincy institutions can always reinvent or re-codify customary laws to suit their agendas at any given time and space (Kludze, 1987).