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Oxfam and Land in Post-Conflict Situations in Africa: Examples from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Rwanda and Angola
Robin Palmer, Global Land Adviser, Oxfam GB
November 2004

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/livelihoods/landrights/

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Introduction
I was asked to write a paper on Oxfam’s¹strategy on land in post-conflict situations. To the best of my knowledge – and I think I should know – there is no such thing! Instead, there tend to have been a series of (very British) pragmatic responses to individual situations, highly dependent on local contexts. I don’t believe that there is any need to apologise for this.

These days all organisations seem to undergo regular, in some cases almost constant, internal restructurings, and Oxfam is certainly no exception. In recent years we have sought to focus our programme work around specific aims and strategic change objectives, and have become much more assertive as a global campaigning organisation (e.g. www.maketradefair.com). Our work on land, a lot of which is documented in the website I manage on Land Rights in Africa (www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/livelihoods/landrights) has taken a bit of a battering in this process. Land is not easy to campaign on in Western countries, and in the course of our programme restructuring into livelihoods, land was initially almost completely written out of our strategy in favour of ‘power in markets’ and ‘women’s labour rights’. It may be making a subterranean comeback however, as people belatedly recognise its critical importance to livelihoods and much else.²

Given the absence of an overall corporate Oxfam strategy on land in post-conflict situations, I intend to focus on 5 brief case studies of what we actually did in the following (roughly chronological) order – in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Rwanda and Angola.³

Before doing so, however, I need to state the Oxfam and its partners deeply resent the remorseless pressures for privatisation of land emanating from USAID. This has been a feature in Mozambique, where USAID has recently sought to undermine a highly progressive land law, and in Angola, where it has exploited the inexperience of civil society actors. Outrageously, very recently in Kenya it has been pressing other donors to withdraw their support for the Kenya Land Alliance, which is by far and away the most effective and constructive lobby group currently operating in a highly volatile climate.

The Kenya Land Alliance (KLA), while not the product of a post-conflict situation, is an interesting case of an institution established by a range of actors at a time when political space for action on land was entirely closed, but which was created in the belief that thinking, analysing and planning were absolutely vital so that the Alliance would be in a strong position to intervene in the policy arena when that political space opened up, as it finally did in 2002. This is a prime example of intelligent forward thinking – and Oxfam was involved, with others, in the mobilisation which led to the creation of the KLA.

Zimbabwe
Oxfam had been supporting organisations working in Rhodesia during the war, and it quickly moved to open an office in Harare following Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Land issues had featured prominently in the rhetoric of the liberation struggle, but fairly rapidly dropped down the new Government’s priority list. Oxfam focussed its priorities on supporting a range of local organisations seeking to help peasant farmers re-establish themselves on the land after the massive dislocation of the final years of the war. These included ORAP (the Organisation of Rural Associations for Progress), which worked in Matabeleland and became very well-known in development circles, the Zimbabwe Project, which helped war veterans re-establish themselves, and the influential Zvishavane Water Project, under its charismatic leader, Zephania Phiri.⁴

This kind of approach was entirely appropriate; it was very much ‘hands off’ and was premised on enabling such organisations on the ground, whose capacities and vision we thought highly of, to support local communities recover and develop after the ravages of war.

We made one specific intervention on land at the national level in 1989/90. This came about in the context of a Front Line States campaign which we were mounting, which sought to illustrate the destruction being wrought across the region by South Africa in its notorious (and genteelly worded) policy of ‘destabilisation’ and to argue the case for sanctions against South Africa. This latter got us into considerable hot water with the (then very conservative) British Charity Commissioners. In Zimbabwe, the 10-year constraints imposed by the Lancaster House Constitution of 1979 were about to come to an end, and Peter Nyoni, Oxfam’s Country Representative, decided that there was need for some shaking up. So he asked me (I was then a Desk Officer for Zimbabwe and other countries) to come to Zimbabwe, interview key members of the Zimbabwean Government, and write a review of the first decade of land reform. This I did; it became a chapter in our Front Line States book,⁵ was published in the journal African Affairs as ‘Land Reform in Zimbabwe, 1980-1990’⁶ and has recently been made available electronically.⁷ I was told that it was recommended reading for successive British High Commissioners going to Harare!

The thrust of the article was highly critical of the Zimbabwean Government, for only paying serious attention to land issues when there was an election to be won, and of the British Government, for seeking to constrain any radical redistribution of land, which it seemed in those Cold War days to equate with Communism. The article concluded by warning that Namibia and South Africa would be next in line for such constraining treatment. So it proved, and the folly of such attitudes is being proved in the tragedy now unfolding in Zimbabwe. Currently, Oxfam is doing what little it can to prepare for what may be yet another post-conflict situation, which will almost certainly be more complex and difficult than that of 25 years ago.

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1. Oxfam in this paper will comprise a mix of Oxfam GB (which employs me) and Oxfam International. It is not worth differentiating in every case in a paper of this nature.
2. For further reflections on this, see Robin Palmer, 'Land as a Global Issue - A Luta Continua', Paper for Oxfam-Zambia Copperbelt Livelihoods Programme Land Workshop, 29-30 March 2004 http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/livelihoods/landrights/downloads/land_global_issue.rtf
3. In Burundi, we were waiting for peace to break out in order to undertake jointly with CARE some post-conflict research and campaigning on identifying linkages between land tenure rights and livelihood security, but suddenly withdrew from the country in 2003, a decision which many have found difficult to understand.
4. For more details, see Robin Palmer and Isobel Birch, Zimbabwe: A Land Divided (Oxford; Oxfam, 1992).
5. Susanna Smith, Front Line Africa: The Right to a Future (Oxford, Oxfam, 1990).
6. Robin Palmer, 'Land Reform in Zimbabwe, 1980-1990', African Affairs, 89, 1990, 163-81.
7. http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/livelihoods/landrights/downloads/zim1980s.rtf

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