LAND TENURE INSECURITY ON THE ZAMBIAN COPPERBELT, 1998: ANYONE GOING BACK TO THE LAND? by ROBIN PALMER Land Policy Adviser Oxfam GB 1: Introduction Leroy Vail’s immense stature, both as a person and a scholar of Southern Africa, is not in doubt. I had the great good fortune to have Leroy as a colleague for the bulk of my academic career and as a friend for far longer than that. He was a wonderfully stimulating and hugely encouraging person to work with. He was a brilliant lecturer. Among many memories that stand out are our weekly visits from Blantyre to the Zomba archives to raid what little was available between the 1919 secretariat fire and the archivist’s draconian 40 year rule, and the excitement generated whenever a new Vail seminar paper was being launched - such as Nyasaland railways (University of Zambia, 1973 vintage). We found ourselves within the same covers of three scholarly volumes,1 which is a source of pride for me. I mourn his loss greatly. This paper is appropriately about Zambia, a country Leroy knew well and came to love deeply. In 1998 Oxfam GB decided to launch a new livelihoods programme on the Copperbelt in response to deteriorating conditions there. Before doing so, it asked a team of researchers to undertake the collection of some baseline data, the better to measure the subsequent impact of its programme. In the course of this research, one of the key concerns to emerge was that of the considerable degree of insecurity over land tenure felt by peri-urban dwellers at a time when the government was desperately attempting to sell off the ailing nationalised copper mines. As a result it was decided to ask a team to enquire into this issue more thoroughly. I was one of those chosen, together with the lawyer Dr. Michelo Hansungule, of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, University of Lund, Sweden, and my Oxfam colleague, Patricia Feeney, who was engaged in a study of privatisation in Zambia.2 We spent the month of August 1998 in Chingola, Mufulira, Kitwe, Ndola (and in Lusaka and Solwezi) interviewing a number of communities and officials from Government (at district, regional and national levels), Councils, ZCCM, churches, trade unions, universities, local NGOs and CBOs. Our Oxfam GB in Zambia Report on Land Tenure Insecurity on the Zambian Copperbelt was finalised in November 1998 and formally presented to a government workshop the following month. In the midst of this (in mid- September 1998) I wrote a short paper on part of our findings for the African Studies Association of the UK’s biennial conference - and it is a revised and updated version of that paper which follows. In an ideal world, before going to the Copperbelt I might have re-immersed myself in its dense literature, but time constraints and other commitments were pressing and we were 1 B Pachai (Ed), The Early History of Malawi (London: Longman, 1972); Robin Palmer and Neil Parsons (Eds), The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977); Robert I Rotberg (Ed), Imperialism, Colonialism, and Hunger: East and Central Africa (Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books, 1983). 2 Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID), Zambia: Deregulation and the Denial of Human Rights, Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, March 2000. 1 asked to look at very specific current issues, to listen to what people had to tell us, and to come up with some recommendations. At the ASAUK conference, Deborah Potts made me aware of the question of the Copperbelt’s relatively slow population growth in recent decades3 as well as the so-called ‘debate’ between James Ferguson and Hugh Macmillan, which had been rumbling in the pages of the Journal of Southern African Studies between 1990 and 1996,4 and which I had followed only perfunctorily. Only perfunctorily because I had been impressed neither by Ferguson’s work nor by his willingness to engage in serious debate with someone whose knowledge of Zambia and of Copperbelt historiography was so clearly far deeper than his own. This view was recently reinforced by a reading of Ferguson’s 1999 book Expectations of Modernity,5 whose bibliography curiously omitted the final, 1996, exchanges with Macmillan. I find Ferguson’s book, which includes a chapter on ‘back to the land?’, glib, superficial, grossly pretentious and, on this particular subject, profoundly wrong - or at best seriously misleading. I say this on the basis of the evidence we gathered in a month of fieldwork among peri-urban Copperbelt communities in Chingola, Mufulira and Kitwe. This seems rather more substantial than Ferguson’s bar chat and his few fleeting visits to rural areas. Ferguson was talking to miners, but it should be remembered that miners have always been a minority of the Copperbelt’s population, albeit a privileged one, and that the majority has always derived a livelihood either by servicing the mines in one way or another or by exploiting the purchasing power of the miners. The census figures on population growth which Deborah Potts has used clearly show that the Copperbelt shared in the well-known massive urbanisation which followed Zambian independence in 1964. But the steady economic decline in the country as a whole, which began in the mid-1970s, subsequently took a severe toll with the result that the average annual population growth rates for the Copperbelt then slowed and were well below those of Lusaka in the 1980s and 1990s (see table below). Although noone really knows with certainty where people leaving the Copperbelt went, it is very obvious from the Bemba-ization of Lusaka that large numbers sought new urban opportunities in the capital, rather than ‘going back to the land.’ As Macmillan writes, ‘Permanent urbanisation is now the most important pattern of residence and is one which has steadily gained in importance since independence. Evidence of some urban-rural migration from the Copperbelt does not detract from this essential fact. The rate of growth of population of the Copperbelt towns may have declined, but the population has continued to increase and become more balanced.’6 3 Deborah Potts, ‘Shall we go home? Increasing Urban Poverty in African Cities and Migration Processes’, The Geographical Journal, 161, 1995, 245-64; Deborah Potts, ‘Urban lives: Adopting new strategies and adapting rural links’, Carole Rakodi (Ed), The Urban Challenge in Africa: growth and management of its large cities (Toko: United Nations University Press, 1997), 447-94. 4 This mercifully concluded in the Journal of Southern African Studies, 22, June 1996, 309-13. 5 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999). 6 Hugh Macmillan. ‘More Thoughts on the Historiography of Transition on the Zambian Copperbelt’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 22, 2, June 1996, 311. 2 Annual Average Population Growth, Zambia: 1963-19907 1963-69 1969-80 1980-90 National population 2.5 3.0 3.2 Total urban: census 8.9 5.8 3.7 Total urban: World Bank estimate 7.2 (1965-80) 6.7 (1980-88) Lusaka 13.8 6.5 6.1 Ndola 9.5 4.0 4.0 Kitwe 8.4 2.6 2.4 Chingola 9.6 2.1 2.5 Mufulira 5.0 2.1 1.2 Luanshya 4.2 1.3 2.8 2. Economic Decline and Going ‘Back to the Land’ For decades Kenneth Kaunda used to urge Zambians to go back to the land. They took no notice.8 The peri-urban dwellers we interviewed on the Copperbelt were still resisting the call, essentially because they are urban people; whether or not they speak English, or wear ‘western’ clothing etc - which James Ferguson places such importance on. What they were doing was looking for land near the Copperbelt. As a woman member of Chiswili Development Committee in Mufulira put it: ‘The problem is the land issue. If we don’t fight for it now, what will our children do? We don’t have anywhere to go. If we don’t have land we can’t develop.’9 Her concern was echoed by large numbers of people we spoke to across the Copperbelt, in Kapisha, Kaminsunda, Kafibale, Kamiteta, Chimfinsa, Chipushi and Kamuchanga (Chingola), in Chiswili, Chandamali, Mutundu and Minambe (Mufulira) and in Luto and Kakolo (Kitwe). The numerous constraints confronting people trying to get access to and ownership of land were one of the principal subjects of our inquiry. It was abundantly clear that we were seeing the Copperbelt at a time of acute economic and social uncertainty, nervousness about the future, and growing and visible poverty. It is well known that the copper mines have been shedding workers for some years. The once powerful Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia (MUZ) estimated that it had only around 37,000 members, compared to 60,000 twenty years ago. In Chingola, ZCCM (Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Ltd) estimated - almost certainly conservatively - that over 1,000 mine jobs had been lost since 1991 and that 10 companies have closed with reputed job losses of over 600. While many miners had been made redundant, many more put had been put on standby but in practice never called back to work. There was every expectation that this trend would continue. In response to specific questioning, nobody in any of the community groups we met expressed much belief that the new owners of the mines (one of whom turned out in 2000 to 7 Potts, ‘Shall we go home?’, 254. See also her more recent ‘Worker-peasants and Farmer-housewives in Africa: the Debate about “Committed” Farmers, Access to Land and Agricultural Production’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 26, December 2000, 807-32.