Civil society activists have cautioned actors in the ongoing land reform process to tailor the legal framework in such a way that will guarantee easy access to and secured ownership of land by women, youth, indigenous communities and other vulnerable groups.

The caution is the very essence of a two-day workshop the civil society platform for the promotion of land governance in Cameroon organised in Yaounde on October 16 and 17.

According to its organisers, the Mbororo Cultural and Development Association, MBOSCUDA, and the Centre for Environment and Development, CED, the overall objective of the workshop was to harmonise strategies for the coordination of the efforts of non-State actors towards the promotion of land governance in Cameroon.

The workshop was part of the National Engagement Strategy, NES, on land governance initiated by the International Land Coalition, ICL. The initiative was taken at the backdrop of Government’s current process to amend the 1974 land law to hearken to the current socio-economic and cultural dispensation in the country.

The civil society activists want all actors on board the process so that the fine-tuning of the legal framework on land will ensure and guarantee equal land rights.

Speaking during the opening ceremony of the workshop, CED Coordinator, Dr. Samuel Guiffo, said the current reform process should take in to consideration the socio-economic and cultural realities in the country.

To him, Government should come out with one land law so as to stem the tides of the bottlenecks that usually impede access to land by the less privileged. He said all the administrations should synergise their actors so as to ward off conflict of interest in the current land reform process.

The legal framework, he went on, should be tailored to minimise land conflicts. Such a situation, he stated, should make land not to be seen as a vector of conflict. He said some of the very bloody wars that have taken place in the world were generated by land conflicts. He cited the Rwandan genocide and the Israeli-Palestinian wars as examples.

Going by Guiffo, the legal framework should be fine-tuned to forestall conflicts. The land rights of indigenous communities should be guaranteed so that they should not be any conflicts between them and multinational companies that have done heavy investments in the areas.

According to the Vice President of MBOSCUDA, Musa Usman, the implementation of reforms to improve land governance will play a big role in accelerating Cameroon’s march to the 2035 vision. He said Cameroon was in desperate need of a law that will guarantee secured access to land by youth, women and indigenous communities.

Taking the floor, the Secretary General at the Ministry of State Property and Land Tenure, Fritz Gerald Nasako, said since 2012, his ministry has been engaged in a process to revise the legal framework on land. He said some of the provisions of the 1974 land law are obsolete and need to be discarded. Land governance, he stated, is part of general governance, saying Government was very sensitive to the land rights of vulnerable groups.

Lauding the quality of actors at the workshop, the Government official said they were in support of any endeavour that will make the use of land as a factor of production. To him, land should be a factor of socio-economic development, unity and not an apple of conflict.

Picking holes with the 1974 land law, Barrister Karimu, a member of MBOSCUDA, told The Post that it provides that all grazing land is national land. “If it is national land, it means that no grazier can claim ownership of such land because Government can take it at any time,” he explained.

He said such a legal provision should be done in such a way that Mbororo cattle rearers can have legal access to and secured ownership of land. Delivering a keynote address at the occasion, former Transport Minister and current General Manager of the Northwest Development Authority, MIDENO, John B. Ndeh, said most of the grazing lands do not have land certificates. To him, any amendment of the legal framework on land should be done to stop the conflict between farmers and graziers.

Traditional rulers from all over the country were part of the non-State actors that attended the workshop. Observers have lauded the civil society’s activism for land rights especially because the 1974 land law makes ownership of land by the poor very difficult.

The procedure for acquiring a land certificate is long, cumbersome and more or less mired in corruption. Moreover, it tacitly encourages land grabbing by the rich and the powerful at the expense of the general good.