Association For Rural Advancement Securing tenure at Ekuthuleni

The world of Ekuthuleni  Ekuthuleni is a hectare farm that was owned by the department of Land Affairs in the Mthonjaneni district near Melmoth in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

South African context  South Africa`s land administration system is primarily geared towards individually owned and registered land – this is despite the commitment by government to recognize communal tenure in law!  Land tenure in South Africa is characterized by “legal pluralism”, which could be defined as contradictions between law and local norms.  The formal system continues to be characterized by land tenure that draws heavily from western legal principles of property, while customary and other adaptations of land tenure continue to be viewed as informal systems.

Access to land and natural resources in Ekuthuleni  There are different ways of gaining access to land and resources and a variation of rights applying to different resources.  This multiplicity and variation is extraordinarily difficult to conceptualize because it emerges as much out of individual strategies and exploitation of opportunities as it is located in a set of shared rules ands practices.  The church, through an induna originally allocated land for residence and cropping to a household head for use by household  The residential right is consistently exclusive

Access to land  The cropping right is seasonally exclusive  In addition to land itself, natural resource access is also am important component of people`s livelihoods and integral to many communal systems of land administration  At Ekuthuleni, the many practices around resource access seem to depend on the resource itself  Access to water appears to override any other right to land.  Ikwane and thatching grass  firewood

Understanding tenure security  Indicators (source: LEAP) 1. People`s rights are becoming clearer. People know better what their rights are and are more able to defend these rights. 2. Land rights administration processes are becoming clearer and better known (application,recording,adjudication,,transfer,land use regulation & distribution of benefits).

indicators 3.Authority in these processes is becoming clearer better known and more used 4.there are more and increasingly places to go to for recourse in terms of these processes and these are better known and more used 5.Land rights administration processes are becoming less unfairly discriminatory against any person or group

indicators 6. Bridges are being built that span the gaps between actual practice and legal requirement 7. Benefits and services are available to people living under communal property institutions as they are to people living under other forms of tenure.

African land tenure  African land tenure systems derive from embeddedness in social relations.in pre colonial societies, what this meant is that land rights were derived from membership of social groups and nested within a variety of social units.  The role of socio political authorities( such as traditional leaders) was essentially to guarantee the right s deriving from group membership and to help resolve disputes,n as well as regulate common pool resource use.

African land tenure  The underlying function of the land tenure regime was to guarantee the right of access of all the fundamental recourses needed to provide a livelihood, and they were thus inclusive rather than exclusive in character. (extract from Cousins,B.2005)

Thank you.. Presented by :Nompilo Ndlovu Association For Rural Advancement