The North East District’s jurisdictional area is estimated to be 5, 960 square kilometers with 61 percent being tribal land while the remaining 39 percent is freehold land. Given this size, and the breakdown, land authorities here have said that the district is faced with a serious shortage of land.
The shortage of land, according to Tati Land Board Chairman Nixon Mogapi, retards land allocation in the area. He shared that by July 2022, the Tati Land Board residential waiting list stood at 63 234.
The Land authorities has since come up with measures on how to speed up land allocation especially in providing shelter through allocation of residential land.
“Remember North East is one of the smallest districts in Botswana. Part of our strategy is to address the challenge of shortage by concentrating on preparing infill layouts instead of village expansion”, said Mogapi at a press conference recently.
Giving a progress report he said land acquisition process by the Board is on-going adding that the detail layouts are sitting on individual properties (masimo). He said the plan for consulting individual owners’ properties has been presented to the Board on the meeting of July 2022 and was approved. He said the detail layouts comprise of 8082 plots. Touching on compensation to land owners he said a total of 2 239 hectares of land has been assessed and a project memo amounting to P204 778. 03 has been sent to the Department of Lands on the 15th of December 2021.
“We have since engaged the Department of Lands and they are working on it to disburse funds for compensation,” Mogapi said.
On land preparation he said all base maps have been submitted to the Council Physical Planning Unit for layouts. He revealed that all these base maps were done and submitted to council as per the dates indicated per village. Furthermore Mogapi said the Land Board will embark on preparation of 10 base maps for the year 2022/ 2023 on the following villages; Jackalas 1, Senyawe, Sechele, Mambo, Patayamatebele, Matopi, Ditladi, Mosojane, Matsiloje and Letsholathebe.
“As for the lay out plans the Board has set a target of 4 975 plots to be allocated for the financial year 2022/ 2022. These plots have been surveyed and are various stages of approval. A total of 1 452 have been approved and we have been directed to allocate within the month of July 2022. So far 705 have been allocated and the allocation is still-ongoing,” he said.
Mogapi also said infill layouts are to be surveyed for the 2022/20223 financial year. He said they have surveyed Infill detail layouts for the the financial year comprising of 2 728 plots. He revealed that they have been given P1 909 600.00 to outsource the surveying of the plots. The tender for the outsourcing according to Mogapi was floated from 30th June to 29 July 2022, then closed and opened on the 29th of July 2022. He said the tender committee that will evaluate and award to eligible bidders has already been appointed. On issuance of secure land title he said the National Land Registration project in Tati jurisdictional areas commenced with the estimated target of 50 872 plots.
“The actual surveyed plots are 50 570 and all these plots were submitted for examination at the Department of Surveys and Mapping. To date we have 33 villages (23 948 old village plots) approved and (12 370 layouts plots) making a total of 36 318 approved plots,” he said.
Mogapi added that there are ten villages (8 653 plots) and 5 599 layout plots which are still under examination making a total of 14 252 plots awaiting approval. He said the GPS surveys are at various stages for resubmission at the Department of Surveys and Mapping in exception of Masunga which a resurvey was done and resubmission will be done in August 2022. He also revealed that Tati Land Board has 43 Cadastral Areas of which all have been approved. He said they have since submitted 26 to Deeds and Registration and 25 have been registered so far.
“Two Certificates of Registered Title for the villages of Mambo and Makaleng have been approved. We are therefore correcting other Certificate of Registered Title for the approved Cadastral Areas,” Mogapi added.
He also said since the re-enactment of the tribal land act which stipulates that people should register their titles in order to print new certificates within six months from the date of commencement, they have so far received 3 384 including Gaborone and Francistown registration points. Mogapi also revealed that they have a waiting list at a total of 64 324.
“All applications on waiting list have been captured on Stardust tool. However, after vetting and on-going land allocations the waiting list had been reduced to 63 234. Vetting continues as we have cleaned 1 681 applications,” he said.
Mogapi explained that the cleaning exercise is done by deleting all rejected applications adding that they will continue to request information of allocated applicants from other Land Boards as well as writing to individuals who appear more than twice in their system to indicate their area or village of priority. Among other important issues he said the North East District has not yet experienced mushrooming or prevalent squatting.
“There are some squatters identified at Tati Siding being three churches and one kraal that are sitting on a surveyed layout and have since been addressed and given three months and one month respectively to have vacated the said area during Board sitting of 19 – 22 April 2022,” said Mogapi He said a site inspection will be conducted to check compliance on the 21 July 2022 and that the landboard is also expected to outsource survey services to augment Survey Manpower.
