Transcript Association For Rural Advancement

Association For Rural
Advancement
Securing tenure at Ekuthuleni
The world of Ekuthuleni
 Ekuthuleni is a 1 160 hectare farm that was
owned by the department of Land Affairs in
the Mthonjaneni district near Melmoth in
KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
South African context
 South Africa`s land administration system is
primarily geared towards individually owned and
registered land – this is despite the commitment by
government to recognize communal tenure in law!
 Land tenure in South Africa is characterized by
“legal pluralism”, which could be defined as
contradictions between law and local norms.
 The formal system continues to be characterized
by land tenure that draws heavily from western
legal principles of property, while customary and
other adaptations of land tenure continue to be
viewed as informal systems.
Access to land and natural
resources in Ekuthuleni
 There are different ways of gaining access to land
and resources and a variation of rights applying to
different resources.
 This multiplicity and variation is extraordinarily
difficult to conceptualize because it emerges as
much out of individual strategies and exploitation
of opportunities as it is located in a set of shared
rules ands practices.
 The church, through an induna originally allocated
land for residence and cropping to a household
head for use by household
 The residential right is consistently exclusive
Access to land
 The cropping right is seasonally exclusive
 In addition to land itself, natural resource access is
also am important component of people`s
livelihoods and integral to many communal
systems of land administration
 At Ekuthuleni, the many practices around resource
access seem to depend on the resource itself
 Access to water appears to override any other right
to land.
 Ikwane and thatching grass
 firewood
Understanding tenure security

1.
2.
Indicators (source: LEAP)
People`s rights are becoming clearer. People
know better what their rights are and are more
able to defend these rights.
Land rights administration processes are
becoming clearer and better known
(application,recording,adjudication,,transfer,land
use regulation & distribution of benefits).
indicators
3.Authority in these processes is becoming
clearer better known and more used
4.there are more and increasingly places to go
to for recourse in terms of these processes
and these are better known and more used
5.Land rights administration processes are
becoming less unfairly discriminatory
against any person or group
indicators
6. Bridges are being built that span the gaps
between actual practice and legal
requirement
7. Benefits and services are available to
people living under communal property
institutions as they are to people living
under other forms of tenure.
African land tenure
 African land tenure systems derive from
embeddedness in social relations.in pre colonial
societies, what this meant is that land rights were
derived from membership of social groups and
nested within a variety of social units.
 The role of socio political authorities( such as
traditional leaders) was essentially to guarantee
the right s deriving from group membership and to
help resolve disputes,n as well as regulate
common pool resource use.
African land tenure
 The underlying function of the land tenure
regime was to guarantee the right of access
of all the fundamental recourses needed to
provide a livelihood, and they were thus
inclusive rather than exclusive in character.
(extract from Cousins,B.2005)
Thank you..
Presented by :Nompilo Ndlovu
Association For Rural Advancement