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somewhat opaque and that secure possession of land with good potential for farming (or of other land
not yet improved) is subject to insecurity.
No land may be transferred without permission from some civil authority, be it the chief of
a traditional community or the Commissioner of Lands. Despite reforms making the process simpler,
there is no guarantee that approval will be granted, nor any published list of conditions to fulfill in
order to insure that approval will be granted. Thus a future commissioner might be tempted to fall
back into corrupt practices, demanding payment of a bribe to authorize the sale of leasehold interests.
Zambian law provides that cities, towns, and rural councils may collect rates, an annual tax
on the value of buildings and other improvements, but not on the value of the land under them. The
law also authorizes the central government to collect a fee for assigning state land to an applicant, and
then an annual ground rent for that particular land. In practice, both rates and ground rents have
lagged far behind inflation and bring in very little revenue. This should be corrected, so that
speculators will find it expensive not to develop leaseholds, and so that local governments can finance
needed services, roads, schools, or other public goods. Yet, because of the difficulty of separating the
value of land from improvements, there is also the risk of excessive double taxation—i.e., setting both
rates so high as to make the combined effect regressive to production incentives.
B. Recommendations
1. Abolish impediments to the subdivision of urban or rural land.
Existing law, by requiring presidential consent before any land transfer, also in effect requires
that consent be sought before any division into two or more parcels. Implicitly, this law asserts that
the government (i.e., the Commissioner of Lands) knows better than anyone else what the correct size
and layout of every piece of land ought to be. Since appropriate site sizes change continuously,
according to many different factors affecting the supply and demand of land on the market, this
requirement is absurd.
This does not mean that government should have no say on land uses and transfers. There is
nothing wrong with clear, logical rules that limit land uses in specific areas in order to protect the
water sources for a city, or to prevent pollution by certain activities that tend to contaminate soil and
groundwater. However, an efficient land market is one in which all landholders (lease or freehold)
are able to sell off part of their land, and are equally free to buy a piece of land and annex it to their
own holdings in order to create a farm or a site suitable to their needs. The land market in Zambia
will become more efficient, and potential investors will feel more secure, when the law is changed to
provide that all land divisions or mergers that do not violate existing land-use regulations duly
promulgated will be approved automatically.
One could go further, providing by law that if the government agency involved fails to act at
all within a certain number of days after presentation of the paperwork, the application is deemed
approved. The interested party would then need only to present to an ombudsman or to a lands
tribunal proof that the application was presented in the appropriate office on a certain date, and that
after the specified number of days, that same office certified that the agency had not made any
determination as to whether it was in order. In that case, the ombudsman or tribunal would
immediately issue a finding that the application was deemed by law to have been approved.