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justice. There appear to be numerous cases in which the use of a particular parcel is less than what
would appear to be the "highest and best use" simply because there is an unresolved conflict over
rights. Further research should establish the feasibility of creating a lands tribunal, as has been done
elsewhere, to resolve such conflicts quickly and fairly. Apart from the advantage of not having a
docket cluttered with every other type of dispute, the tribunal would be staffed with judges
knowledgeable about land law and policy, increasing the speed of resolution as well as the consistency
of decisions.
V. Determination of ground rents
A. Existing policy
In theory and in present law, no real estate in Zambia may change hands without the consent
of the president. The incumbent has delegated this responsibility to the land commissioner, but a future
president could cancel that delegation, or the commissioner could deny consent unreasonably, and the
affected party would have little effective recourse. Because State Land is delivered as leasehold
interests, holders are supposed to pay ground rent rather than property taxes on land. (Improvements,
of course, are subject to the property tax called rates.) While the former government asserted that bare
land had no economic value, it nevertheless collected money in the form of ground rent.
Under current law, all private properties are merely improvements, built on land which is the
property of the government. However, an existing law attempts to protect tenants by controlling the
level of rents charged. (In effect, they live in flats under subleases of parts of buildings built on
government-owned lands.)
CAP 438 (the Rent Act), 1972, states that the correct value of rent for buildings rented to
tenants by the actual holder of the government lease was 15 percent per year on the sum of the cost
of construction and the value of the land. This law was not appealed nor amended when the
Conversion Act, which declared in ARTICLE 12 that bare land has no value," was enacted in 1975.
By not repealing CAP 438 (the Rent Act), 1972, the government implicitly accepted the fact that bare
land has value to those who control it.
The actual market value of land varies greatly from site to site, depending mainly on its size,
location, and services. In Zambia, however, the MOL simply assesses a ground rent that each holder
must pay annually to the government for the use of the land. These rents are established arbitrarily
and change every few years by administrative decision. In the current version, ground rents per
hectare differ between residential, farming, and commercial sites. Little or no effort has been made
in the past to adjust the rents for site variances. In a proper ground rent system, rents would be higher
on the more valuable locations (e.g., along a major highway or on the shore of a river or lake).
After the inflation of recent years, the rents under present law are so low as to be meaningless.
Rent collection, aside from that required at the time of transfer, is rarely enforced. The present ground
rents were set in 1991, on the basis of the locality and the land use, at rates per hectare or part of a
" Some functionaries did not see the two laws as contradictory; they put down "zero" as the value of the land, because
the president said that was its value. They then calculated the maximum legal rent accordingly.