Cover Story Property rights in sub-Saharan Africa continue to evoke strong passion in academic, development and political circles. This can be traced to the deep ties between the people and the land, the key property institution in Africa, argues Emmanuel Ofegba Nuesiri who says that land is inextricably linked to the communality of African life, thus there has to be greater engagement with context to get property rights right in sub-Saharan Africa C harles Onyango-Obbo writing in The East African newspaper in November last year about contemporary land grab in Uganda by the upper class observed that this was one consequence of the market-based policies of the state. His comment highlights the sometimes complex and unintended consequences of market-based policies on property rights right in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). While these policies are prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and other donors in the context of alleviating poverty, research by Jacqueline Klopp at Columbia University shows that the preference for private property regimes inherent in these policies has fuelled land-grab. Advocates of these neo-liberal economic policies including the renowned Peruvian economist, Herman De Soto, forcefully argue that the transformation of land in the developing world from communal into private property is the sure path to wealth. However the passion that land rights evoke in SSA makes it an issue of continued deep interest to academics and development practitioners. Laura Underkufler, the Arthur Larson Professor of Law at Duke University, in her book, The Idea of Property: Its Meaning and Power, shows that understandings of property are context speciic social constructs. This seems self-evident. However, the implications tend not to be given enough attention when property rights prescriptions are handed to developing countries by donors. While discourse about property in the West is moving on from tangibles such as land to intangibles such as intellectual property, SSA is yet to resolve contestations over land – its core property domain. Informed observers are agreed that land relations in SSA are inextricably linked with governance reforms, given the agrarian resource base. Thus the land entitlementgovernance reform nexus calls for thoughtful and innovative policies for optimal economic beneits for the people of SSA. The social adaptation to, and economic eficiency of private property in the developed world does not make it a sine qua non for wealth generation for people everywhere. In SSA a large number of the population (male and female) still attaches deep emotive ties to speciic landscapes. Thus while it might be inancially proitable to let go of landholdings, the landholder may stubbornly refuse to do so when approached by an investor, as Onyango-Obbo rightly observed in his newspaper article. This seemingly irrational response has led to De Soto to coin the phrase ‘dead capital’. This refers to assets which in his view are not converted to capital due to poor appreciation of their inancial advantage, sub-optimal statutory codiication of private property rights and consequently ineffectual market for these assets. However, men and women in SSA do not lack an understanding of property rights or the inancial rewards they promise; often these can trace their landholding rights several generations back. The dificulty is that the SSA nations and their inancial institutions are built on the Westphalian model that discounts indigenous notions of property but is sympathetic to Western constructs. The disconnection between the dominant Western paradigm of depersonalised property and the indigenous logic of property as an embodiment of identity is at the heart of the property-wealth dilemma in SSA. The World Bank is without doubt SSA’s major multilateral donor partner and has been at the forefront of governance and land policy reform on the continent. The Bank’s position, irst articulated in its 1975 Land Reform Policy Paper, is equivocal that private property is good for development. However Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao, development economists at the Bank, in their more recent publication, Community-Based and Driven Development: A Critical Review, recognise that community-based development has some merits. Nevertheless, the Bank’s prescription for economic development as evident in poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) from SSA still lean heavily towards market liberalisation and strengthening of private property rights. Where social development through communitybased initiatives is included in PRSPs, for example community forestry in Cameroon PRSP, it is weakly articulated and inanced. Given that the PRSPs are currently the blueprint and determining Africa Week Magazine layout: sixoone media Privatisation pains and property rights in Africa  framework for donor support to SSA, the implication is that there is greater push for institutionalisation of private property regimes in these countries. In contrast to the received wisdom of the universal suitability of the neo-liberal economic model to produce wealth, Ha-Joon Chang in his book, Kicking Away the Ladder Development Strategy in Historical Perspective, argues that it is the rules of international trade that has locked developing countries in the poverty trap. He goes on to show that historical government support and protection of home industries is the key to wealth in the West, thus disagreeing with the prescription that unfettered liberalisation of the economy in developing countries will create enough wealth to attenuate the misery of the poor. Rather than create wealth for all, unfettered liberalisation maintains contemporary asymmetries of wealth due to historical accumulation. This is because it provides a platform for investors from the West to cherry pick the industries and sectors in which to invest in developing countries, with proit as the motive rather than building the national economy. Is this then a prescription to a return of state-owned corporations in SSA? This article does not seek to privilege a particular type of property right regime for SSA but to draw attention to the need for clear thinking on the issue. Prescribing a speciic type of property right regime, de-contextualised from the political economy in which it is embedded, would yield uncertain chaotic outcomes. Mansuri and Rao, in their publication referred to above, show that community drivendevelopment is not always economically eficient or socially empowering. They succinctly point out its pitfalls and provide recommendations on how these pitfalls can be avoided. However, their analysis and many others on community-based development have ignored the difference between auto-communal systems and para-communal systems. The former generates self-censorship and this reinforces group compliance, while the latter, being exogenously generated by external actors such as donors, government or non-governmental organisations, often does not generate the same critical degree of self-censorship that would reinforce compliance. It is no secret that traditional saving schemes in SSA, more often referred to as Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), have enjoyed durability and eficiency envied by public and private inancial institutions. The edited volume by Shirley Ardener and Sandra Burman, Money-GoRound, shows that while ROSCAs have sanctions mechanism, selfcensorship is the key factor that reinforces compliance in these institutions. ROSCAs are not just inancial institutions because members view their participation as a communal exercise with deep esoteric and instrumental value. Transferring ROSCAs to other communities elsewhere that have not built up the complex cultural sensibility to the practice would not yield the same optimal outcome as it does in the parent community. The point is that while communitydriven development projects facilitated by outsiders’ aims to recreate auto-communality, the short-term duration of such projects instead gives rise to paracommunality which easily breaks down when the project ends. The development of ROSCAs in SSA is comparable to the development of market-based private property regimes in developed countries. Universalising and uncritically transposing market-based private property regimes from their centres of evolution to SSA would yield chaotic sub-optimal outcomes. A comprehensive solution starts with the admission that poverty in SSA is not about its inherent property regime but about the disconnection between the market-  Africa Week Magazine 8th -14th October 2007 based state logic and the esoteric logic that permeates life at the local level. Thus, donors investing in social development in SSA must shoulder the transaction cost associated with obtaining a nuanced understanding of the context in which intervention is located. It is worth asking at this juncture if the donor community paid attention to the reasons why state property regimes underperformed, before prescribing market-based solutions across board. Is the solution outright privatisation or capacity building for state oficials, or perhaps the empowering of the polity to demand accountability? The tortuous privatisation process in SSA and the trauma it occasions is highlighted by the Cameroonian journalist, Bouddih Adams, in his column in The Post newspaper in July 2006. His article exposes how a key agricultural parastatal privatised its most proitable holding, the Tole Tea Estate, to a supposedly South African irm which turned out to be a front for a local business magnate. The politically inluential magnate was able to use his inluence to purchase the tea estate at a price well below its market value, and to introduce measures inimical to the welfare of the estate’s workers. The tragic drama of suffering for Tole Tea Estate workers is still being played out; a clear illustration that outright privatisation is not always a panacea. While this article is not suggesting that private property regimes cannot work in Africa, it subscribes to a position articulated two decades ago by Robert Wade of the London School of Economics (LSE), which sates: “There can be no presumption that collective action will generally work—any more than there can be a presumption that private property or state regulation will generally work.” One hat simply doesn’t it all. Emmanuel Ofegba Nuesiri is Clarendon Scholar at St. Antony’s College Oxford, England. layout: sixoone media Cover Story