By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, Aug 27 1996 (IPS)

As the deadline approaches for Mozambique’s government to present a draft land act to parliament in time for its next session, at least one political group has intimated that it will oppose the bill.

“The land question is a hot item, yes,” says Almeida dos Santos Tambara, RENAMO’s rapporteur and third most senior parliamentarian. “We are waiting for the bill to come before giving our opinion but this much I can say: so far, the discussions have excluded the involvement of rural people, whom we represent.”

The land law has been debated nationwide during the year. Should the government meet the Sept. 12 deadline, parliament will discuss it at its upcoming session, which starts in late October.

In the meantime, a land rush is on to grab 20 million hectares (ha) of uncultivated land with excellent potential for farming, hunting and tourism. In all, Mozambique has roughly 80 million ha, of which 40 million are arable. Less than 10 per cent is under cultivation.

The land bill seeks to clarify land tenure in a country reeling from 16 years of civil war, 12 years of state-controlled economy, and widening free-market policies since the late 1980s.

When the draft land bill was discussed at a national conference in early June, NGOs, academics and donors recommended protecting the rights of rural communities to their land. Peasants are 80 percent of Mozambique’s population. They grow the bulk of the food Mozambicans eat and the cashew nuts, cotton and copra their country exports.

Top officials of the ruling party, FRELIMO, met in early August to review proposed changes to the bill. Insiders say the provisions regarding rural rights were watered down and state control over land allocation strengthened. The reason, they add, is that many FRELIMO cadres are involved in the land rush, acquiring concessions for themselves and their associates.

FRELIMO is also said to have decided to condition foreign ownership — a contentious issue — on association with a Mozambican national. Government officials are well placed for that. So are South Africans.

In September, Niassa province in the northwest will receive the first 24 Afrikaner settler families from South Africa, out of a planned total of 1,000. Under the Mozagrius agreement signed in May by Presidents Nelson Mandela and Joachim Chissano, the settlers will be given concessions for fifty years.

Their advance team is dozens of Afrikaner missionaries of the South African Reformed Church, the ideological justifier of apartheid in South Africa, who roam Niassa province showing movies about the life of Jesus to Muslim villagers.

Because peasants and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Niassa are not aware of the consequences of the Afrikaner settlement, the Association for Rural Mutual Help (ORAM) and the Group for Land Studies (NET) of the Eduardo Mondlane University are weighing in.

ORAM will support an NGO umbrella group in Niassa, while NET will do a land planning study and network with South African universities who are working on the settlers’ side.

“Mozambican technical staff have been pretty much removed from the whole Mozagrius scheme,” says NET director Jose Negrao. “A land planning study will prevent the setting up of Boer ghettoes or Bantustans, encouraging the mixing of Mozambicans and South Africans.”

“If Boer ghettoes are created, then President Mandela is exporting apartheid to us and not agricultural tecnology and knowhow, as is said,” he adds.

In the northern provinces of Nampula and Cabo Delgado, peasants have been evicted from their land, although the number is said to be still small. When peasant farmers are chased by big agribusiness like Joao Ferreira dos Santos and Companhia de Angoche, they move on to unoccupied land. How long they will be able to do this is anybody’s guess.

“We don’t know how long there will be land available, or how near to roads and markets,” says Maria Elena Taipa, a social worker in Nampula. “This is why Makua women demand title deeds to their land.” The Makua people of the northern provinces are matrilineal societies where land remains in the hands of women.

In the central provinces, timber logging is proceeding apace. Recently, ‘Megamadeiras’, a joint Mozambican-Zimbabwean firm, announced its plans to soon begin logging 40,000 ha of woods in Dombe, near Sussundenga, in the heart of the territory of armed bandits known as ‘Chimuenjes’. Megamadeiras keeps mum about how it plans to operate in a bandit-infested area. Nor is replanting a word heard in its press interviews.

Huge hunting reserves are also springing up in Sofala province. A company called SAFRIQUE, for example, was awarded rights to six hunting areas totalling nearly 223,000 ha, about the size of Luxembourg. Something went wrong, though, because last week, the hunting areas were up for grabs again, as announced in the main daily, Noticias.

Land pressure is hottest south of Maputo. In Matutuine district, on the strip of land between the border with South Africa and Mozambique’s unspoiled beaches on the Indian Ocean, many investors want land. So do the 47,000 peasants who live on, and off it.

This is why Mozambique’s Minister of Coordination for the Environment (MICOA), Bernardo Ferraz, is caught between a rock and a hard place. He has until mid-September to tell the cabinet which development project is best suited to Matutuine.

MICOA has commissioned a team of top respected Mozambican professionals to produce a master plan for Matutuine.

One option is a megatourism scheme, comprising five luxury lodges, with a golf course and casino, linked by an antique steam train. For safari-cum-beach lovers, the nearby Maputo elephant reserve, now down to some 100 animals, will be restocked with lions, buffalo, rhinos, elephants and leopards.

The developer, flamboyant American billionaire James Ulysses Blanchard III, who supported RENAMO while it was still a rebel movement but is now friendly with FRELIMO, wants 200,000 ha from the Machangulo peninsula, close to the KwaZulu-Natal border.

But there is a snag. Smack in the middle of Blanchard’s proposed territory lies 32,000 ha of land conceded in the late 1980s to South African Pulp and Paper Industry (SAPPI) in a joint venture with the Mozambican government. SAPPI has planted a few saplings and threatens to sue if the concession is revoked.

The Mozambican government wants Blanchard to pay any eventual damages, but the U.S. billionaire is said not to be keen to do so.

RENAMO has kept surprisingly quiet, both in the debate and in the land rush. Its participation in the well-publicized national land conference was almost incognito, with no public statements.

Tambara says RENAMO officials lack capital and contacts to join the land rush. Regarding the draft bill, he says that, as soon as it is sent to parliament, RENAMO will set up a study group to analyse — and fight — it.

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