In many African cities, governments have been unable to provide sufficient appropriately located and priced planned and serviced urban land to meet demand. As a result, informal settlements are growing faster than the rest of the city. Efforts to deal with this situation are hampered by several factors including lack of resources to acquire and service land to forestall haphazard development. In 2003, the Ministry of Lands, using borrowed funds from the Treasury, undertook an ambitious land servicing project in Dar es Salaam. The aims were to: alleviate the shortage of surveyed and serviced urban plots; tackle the rapid increase of informal settlements; control land speculation; address corruption; complement the national drive to reduce poverty; develop satellite towns; and implement the ruling Party's manifesto on liveable human settlements. This paper evaluates this undertaking from a good governance point of view. The Project was efficiently implemented. Over 40,000 plots were produced and sold; the invested billions of shillings were recouped several times over; and replication was enabled. However, it increased poverty among those whose land was acquired; and fuelled the growth of informal settlements. With less than 17% of the plots categorized as low cost, the Project was not pro-poor. Outcomes included the realization that land had value that could be unlocked with servicing. This has spawned several projects involving servicing land for sale, undertaken by other authorities and the private sector. This, however, is excluding low income households. The Project's achievements were realized at the expense of good land governance exemplified by: lack of coordination among key players; shortfalls in transparency, public participation, institutional decentralisation and inclusiveness; and neglect of environmental fallouts. Low income households were in practice excluded from this and subsequent money-driven land delivery schemes, a trend that needs to be reversed to avoid social polarization.
J. M. L. Kironde 349
Hazardous land is given high profile in the Tanzanian National Land Policy 1995. Subsequent land laws provide for participatory procedures to declare land to be hazardous. Public authorities have over the years been concerned about the continued living on a flood-prone Msimbazi River Valley in the city of Dar es Salaam. Despite adopting carrot policies such as allocating alternative land, and stick policies including forced eviction and demolition, sections of the population have continued to live in the Valley. Research on the ways public authorities have dealt with flood-prone areas, established that legal procedures to declare Msimbazi River Valley to be hazardous or environmentally sensitive have never been taken, and are not well-known among officials. Moreover, focus has been placed on valley dwellers instead of addressing citywide flooding. Paternalism, dealing with market failure and exerting political authority are considered to be the drivers motivating the government to evict valley dwellers. It is concluded that the approach dealing with dwellers of floodprone areas should adhere to legal provisions by, in particular, being participatory; should utilize available technology to identify, declare and demarcate hazardous land, should put this land to the badly needed greening of the city; and should address citywide flooding as a part of managing the city instead of focusing on a few individuals in a particular hazardous area.
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