Ambreena Manji

Gender and the politics of the land reform process in Tanzania

In I998, over seven years after a Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters was appointed by the then president of Tanzania, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, in January i99i, it is expected that a Land Bill will be tabled in the Tanzanian National Assembly. These seven years have witnessed mounting debate on the purpose and direction of land tenure reform. The purpose of this article is to review the debate in order to show that the question of womens unequal rights to land has been almost totally neglected. The article explores the politics of the land tenure reform process in Tanzania, and examines the reasons why the gender gap in the command over property has received little attention. Tanzania is presently at an important juncture in the restructuring of land relations. Since the issue of land reform came to the forefront of the political agenda in the early i99os, an opportunity has existed to address the question of womens ownership and control of land. I argue, however, that this opportunity has not been taken, and that the issue of womens land rights has become marginalised within the debate and consequently in policy. Examining first what may be termed the mainstream of the land tenure debate, conducted on the whole by those involved in making major policy recommendations and drafting legislation, it is argued that the issue of gender has been largely ignored. There have been a number of opportunities when the specific issue of womens relations to land should have been explicitly addressed in research findings and recommendations. Instead, one sees no more than a passing acknowledgement of the gender dimensions of land tenure reform. This is most noticeably the case in the academic writing of those who profess themselves to be most concerned with the land issue as one of democracy and justice. A number of reasons will be canvassed to explain this. This article goes on to discuss the role of gender progressive groups,

Eliminating Poverty? ‘Financial Inclusion’, Access to Land, and Gender Equality in International Development

The UK White Paper on International Development published in 2009 explicitly links access to financial services with poverty reduction. In doing so, it echoes the policies the World Bank set out in its 2008 Policy Research Report on Finance. This paper offers a detailed analysis of these development policies and connects the current plans for the expansion of financial sectors in the developing world with policies that promote the acquisition of formal land title. The paper argues that as asset-backed lending expands, commercial banks will come to play an increasingly important role in third world economies. In light of this, it reviews important first-hand accounts of the difficulties of drafting legislation to protect womens access to land in the face of opposition from commercial lenders, using Tanzania and Uganda as illustrative examples. The paper assesses the implications of expanding access to credit for gender equality and concludes that it is difficult to reconcile the promotion of financial inclusion with the aim of international development to end poverty.

Imagining Women's 'Legal World': Towards a Feminist Theory of Legal Pluralism in Africa

This article argues that most feminist legal theory has been located within a dominant and phallocentric legal centralist paradigm and that this has hindered feminisms engagement with legal pluralism. I will argue that theoretical work which privileges state law can at best furnish us with only partial accounts of womens experiences of law. Articulating a feminine view of the (legal) world requires an engagement with legal pluralism.

Satire and the Politics of Corruption in Kenya

Corruption in Kenya has been a matter of intense concern for foreign donors and the international financial institutions. External efforts to change the ‘governance culture’ in this regard are not simply instrumental, composed of material restrictions and incentives. They are also inherently rhetorical, seeking to establish the plausibility of a set of values rooted in political economy. This paper examines two widely reported speeches of a former British High Commissioner that can be read together as a highly figurative satire on political standards in Kenya. Having developed a reading of anti-corruption governance as satire, we extend it to the role of the legal profession in the illegal and irregular allocation of public land. We argue that, as well as demonstrating an application of the rhetorical analysis of neo-liberal governance, the case of land grabbing in Kenya also highlights the instability of many of the key binary oppositions underpinning dominant anti-corruption strategies. This instability can be understood in rhetorical terms by drawing on the work of post-colonial writers and critics on the category of excremental satire. Rather than a clear binary opposition, these suggest the interrelation, or more precisely the mutual contamination, of corruption and normal capitalist accumulation.

Legal paradigms in contemporary land reform

Abstract This article examines the extent to which contemporary land reform debates are based on assumptions about ‘legal centralism’ – an implicit insistence that the label ‘law’ should be confined to state law, and that other normative orderings are, and should be, subordinate to the state. The current orthodoxy is, in other words, premised upon a model of historical progression that leaves little room for local variation: it is assumed that as societies develop modern capitalist economies, non-state legal orders give way neatly to state law and that, in relation to property rights, informal tenure arrangements are superseded by formalisation. In fact, contemporary development policy is based on a misreading of the historical record. There is little evidence to suggest that legal and property relations evolve in a linear fashion from the customary to the formal. The importance currently attached to formal state law reflects a legal-centralist theoretical outlook and an ‘evolutionary development’ approach to policy. The continuation of non-state legal orders concerning land relations in many developing countries poses a powerful challenge to frameworks predicated upon evolutionary development.

‘Like a Mask Dancing’: Law and Colonialism in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God

Whilst the study of law and literature is now well established in the western academy, little attention has been paid to portrayals of law in African literature. In addition, studies of the colonial state by lawyers, political scientists, and historians have neglected African fictions long engagement in this area. Achebes fiction prefigured many of the issues engaging critics and theorists on the wider social scientific terrain. This paper draws on Achebes simile –‘the world is like a mask dancing’ ndash; to delineate an approach to power and authority. The lesson of Arrow of God– that the ‘legal world’ cannot be understood by standing in one place – is of wider significance to those engaged in the study of law and society.

The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015: Legislative Spending Targets, Poverty Alleviation and Aid Scrutiny

With the enactment of the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015, the United Kingdom has enshrined an aid target in law. It is now under a legal duty to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) each year on aid. This article assesses the implications of enshrining a spending target for development assistance in law. It argues that commentators have focused their analyses too narrowly on the legal target and that it is in fact the mechanisms for scrutinising development assistance contained in section 5 of the new Act that will be important in future. This is because judicial scrutiny of aid spending is a remote possibility as a result of the International Development Act 2002. The article provides an analysis of the new legislation in the context of the UKs now detailed legislative framework for international development aid and concludes that this framework is far from satisfactory.

Bulldozers, homes and highways: Nairobi and the right to the city

In Kenya road building, widely viewed as an ‘unqualified human good’, is closely linked to an ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. In this paper the author argues that road building is an attempt to assert political authority derived from a longstanding developmentalist impulse, one in which private accumulation and spectacular public works go hand in hand. In light of massive infrastructural transformations, the author develops a conceptualisation of the right to the city: what is needed is a radical understanding of the city and its potentialities that wrests control of the idea away from a bureaucratic vision, and imbues it instead with collective meaning.

Restoring Leviathan? The Kenyan Supreme Court, constitutional transformation, and the presidential election of 2013

This paper analyzes the Kenya Supreme Courts ruling in Odinga v IEBC, a petition challenging the declared outcome of the 2013 presidential election. The case was immediately significant given the hope that recourse to the courts would help to avoid widespread civil unrest which had followed the disputed presidential election of 2007. It was also a crucial test for the new dispensation established under the 2010 Constitution widely held to have broken with the authoritarian and unaccountable regimes which dominated Kenya both under colonialism and after independence. The paper critically reviews the reasoning of the Supreme Court on six key issues raised in the petition attending to the broader normative and political implications of the judgment. We argue that both in its substantive conclusions and in the style of reasoning adopted, Odinga v IEBC is inconsistent with the transformative ambitions underpinning the new constitution. Through its emphasis on evidential and procedural rules, rather than principled analysis, the judgment tends to reinforce the powers of the executive and the model of a unitary state beyond the reach of the law.

Remortgaging Women's Lives: The World Bank'sLand Agenda in Africa

In recent months, the World Bank has issued a series of draft policy reports on land relations. This is the first time in over two decades that the Bank has sought to review its policy on lending in the land sector. Access to the draft reports and participation in the consultation process has, however, been severely limited. Nonetheless, the World Bank expects to issue the final Report by the end of this year. This paper presents a gender analysis of the two draft documents that have been made available to date. It assesses their implications for gender relations in Africa. It explores the World Banks promotion of formal rural credit and challenges the assumption of the availability of womens unpaid agricultural labour. The paper argues that, far from being over, the struggle over land relations which has characterised the last decade in Africa, must continue.