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In most leasehold systems (including that of Zambia), land is provided at little or no charge,
and subsequently the value of the land is not allowed to be reflected in transactions. Land may be said,
as was the case in Zambia, to have no value, indicating that government as a matter of policy refuses
to recognize its value. This raises several problems. There are distortions in land use created when
market forces are not allowed to determine the allocation of land. Land near Lusaka is often underused
precisely because it has been treated as a free good. There are problems with urban elites, both
governmental and commercial, grabbing land from rural people. Because the land is virtually a free
good, cost puts no brake on their ambitions. In some counties, such as Guinea-Bissau, this
landgrabbing has been extensive (Bruce and Tanner 1992), and in a number of countries it has caused
serious, often interethnic, conflict (Bruce 1989; Platteau 1992; Binswanger et al. 1993).
Such systems, almost inevitably, have serious corruption problems and encourage rent-seeking
behavior. The tendency towards corruption is strong because a limited amount of a valuable good is
being administratively rationed and allocated virtually for free. The gap between the real value—what
someone would pay to get the land—and the value recognized by government is the amount which
those seeking land will be willing to pay in bribes.
In addition, because state leasehold systems do not rely on market forces to exert economic
pressure for land development, they must instead rely upon contractual development conditions.
Development conditions have in practice proven very problematic. If they require a specific type of
development, for instance a coffee farm or a petrol station, they are too rigid and impose economically
irrational limits on behavior as rapidly changing economic circumstances alter the most profitable use
of land. On the other hand, if the development conditions are vague, they are difficult to enforce.
There is a tendency for holders to be harassed by reports of noncompliance from those seeking to
replace them on the land, and again there is great potential for corruption in the evaluation of
compliance. In many countries, political dissent has caused a review of the dissenter's compliance with
development conditions. In fact, there has been almost complete failure in most countries to
systematically and fairly evaluate the fulfillment of development conditions. The requisite staff and
resources, especially transport, are usually not available. Alternatives to development conditions
include less-direct land use controls, such as zoning enforced through fines, plus mechanisms such as
economic ground rents which exert pressure on landholders to either place their land in economically
profitable uses or, if they cannot afford to do so, to transfer the land to someone who can develop it.
Finally, the experience with leasehold systems shows that it is simply difficult to find the
resources for a national system of land administration. It is one thing to implement a leasehold system
in a settlement scheme, quite another to imagine the costs and staff requirements of bringing all the
land in a country under such a system. Even a freehold system requires an administrative
infrastructure—the cadastral and registry system—and cannot be expanded without concern for costs.
In light of these problems, there is a growing realization that it is not feasible to broadly
replace indigenous tenure systems with leasehold (and to a lesser extent freehold) in the short or even
intermediate term. The need is to identify what the priority areas should be for the limited tenure
"replacement" which can be afforded. Replacement is likely to be most effective in rather limited
geographic areas where market forces, including produce markets for relatively high-value commercial
crops and rural financial markets, are well developed. For other areas, the need is for tenure-change
strategies which stress more evolutionary processes and may involve continued reliance for some time
on the relatively cost-effective customary institutions of land administration.
Zambian experience and needs will be examined with these issues in mind.