Out of the country’s four local authorities, land boards are hugely the most unpopular with the people. While they are prone to corruption, their unpopularity emanate from poor service delivery. They are the victims of their own creation. At the beginning, they functioned well aware that their core business was to allocate land to the people. Somewhere in between, it seems they forgot that function and allowed waiting list to increase until they could no longer address the situation with easy. This is the beginning of their undoing.
For the other three local authorities, complaints were minimal. I have never heard people calling for the dissolution of the district administration, the tribal administration or the district council even though the last two are prone to corruption as well. District councils’ breeding ground for corruption is largely from their tendering system. Concerning tribal administrations, corruption can be detected on the appointment of dikgosana. This is an area where some dikgosi often look for boot lickers. Most dikgosi do not accept descending voices so they make sure that whoever gets the nod should be a yes boy. The other area of corruption can be seen during trials. I have evidence of a kgosi who presided over a case involving his niece and her customary husband. The niece had left the husband for more than 20 years and came back to claim the plot the husband had been staying as hers. She had lost the case at the land board when she finally took it to the kgotla. The dispute was on plot ownership. Somewhere during the proceedings, the kgosi presiding over the case forgot that he was seating there as kgosi and should therefore be seen to be impartial. Suddenly he reminded the respondent (husband) that he still owed the niece’s parents bogadi (lobola) and asked when he planned to pay. Although the bogadi issue was not a matter before the court, the respondent replied, “when I am ready.” That was bad! District administrations are clean in as far as corruption is concerned.
The cry over land boards’ poor service delivery is loud and clear. Even submissions before the Constitutional Review Commission currently touring the country are more on the performance of land boards than any of the remaining three local authorities. Out of frustration, people want the return of land management to dikgosi not realizing that they would be going hundred steps backward if the suggestion was accepted.
However, to the delight of many, the Mochudi Subordinate Land Board which appears to have been asleep for several years in the past, seem to be awakening from their sleep. Service delivery which has been disappointingly very slow especially allocation for ploughing land is now being done at an encouragingly fast pace. People don’t know what brings about this sudden change. But they see it as a welcome development. They wish it be continued. These changes surfaced last June or July when the Mochudi subordinate land board descended on the Kgope area of Senamane lands to map ploughing areas applied for. The list of applicants was too long. Some of them had just applied while others had been waiting for more than ten years. The area is on the boundary with Kweneng District. Less than six months later, applicants have been receiving letters from the land board informing them that their applicants had been approved and that they should liaise with land registration office for collection of land certificates. I only met a few of those whose applications have been approved but I guess there had been rejections as well. A father whose two daughters’ applications were approved, was very excited. He was pleased by the speed with which the land board addressed their application. “Quite honestly, I did not expect the land board to process my application within such a short space of time knowing that some people had been waiting for more than ten, twelve, fifteen years” for their application to be processed, said another. He attributed these positive changes to the effort of the Masisi’s administration. In the recent past, allocation of land for ploughing purposes was at a snail pace, he said adding that, the wait was so long that some people even died while still waiting.
Last June or July, the subordinate land board started addressing the backlog by a way of a mapping exercise. The exercise was concentrated in an area called Senamane within the Kgope enclave. People have started guessing as to what really brings this sudden change on the part of service delivery? Could it be because of the new land board members who were appointed following the 2019 general election and therefore the new broom is sweeping clean or something else like the new government cracking the whip? There are those who think that the current chairperson, Monagaeng Matsetse is a person some know to be workaholic. They have heard stories that before he retired from the public service, he was very good at time management and was a result oriented personality. This makes sense.
Without taking everything away from him, I probed a few people who are knowledgeable of the operations of land board to find out exactly what makes the Mochudi Subordinate land board to appear to be the envy of many nowadays. My interviewee requested to remain anonymous even though there was nothing controversial on what they had to say. However, there may be hidden issues which have made the land board appear more efficient than their predecessors. While my article was based on the Mochudi land board, they decided to give a national outlook in their input. That immensely enriched this article. They say that much of the reforms that are taking place are the result of adhering to service standards. These service guides help both the land board and the applicants to know the time to be taken for their applications to be processed. They also require land boards to address transfers of land within a month. For, boreholes within ploughing fields, they should also be dealt with within a month. The new system (Lupcas) states that all ploughing fields should be mapped and surveyed prior to allocation. However, they note that in some cases resources are not all available to the land boards, making it difficult for the personnel to implement plans within stipulated period. Land boards have very few land surveyors and the few available ones are currently concentrating on surveying and registration of previous allocations.
Concerning residential land, they say the delay is brought about by non-availability of land, low compensation rates to acquire land in the periphery of villages, and non expansion of water works boundaries. The other thing which contributes to the improvement of service delivery is the signing of performance agreement in line with the Ministry’s vision. The vision stresses the need for sustainable land use plans to cater for the current and future generation.
Furthermore, land boards have to cope with the ever increasing human and wildlife population. More often than not, land boards have to acquire agricultural land from owners to meet residential needs. In most cases, the stumbling block has always been farmers’ reluctance to release their land because of unattractive compensation rates. They want the government to equate the rates in tribal land to those in freehold and stateland.As a result of these disappointing low rates, it is said some land owners attach unreasonable demands before agreeing to terms set to them by the land board. In Mogoditshane for instance, the land owners demand that they be given a number of plots within his tshimo before giving the remaining portion away in addition to financial compensation.. In a majority of such demands the land board in Mogoditshane complied with such demands. This seems to be driven by the acceptance that land does not increase but the demand for it for various uses keeps on increasing daily. Under performing land boards are taken to task by the ministry. Board chairpersons and secretaries always account for the performance of their boards.
While land boards are prone to corruption by officials and laziness, the Ministry responsible seems to have added to the problems of coping with allocation by occasionally issuing idiotic instructions. For instance, in 2015, it instructed land boards to continue receiving applications despite the freezing of allocations due to land shortage. That decision resulted with an astonishing increase in the waiting list. There was a stampede at Oodi in the Kgatleng District and at Tlokweng because of that announcement. To date land boards are still dealing with the waiting list the ministry caused. It is said the waiting list in Kweneng stood at 140 000 in 2016.
