No More Land Deals by Sabhukus in Hwange

There is gnashing of teeth, excitement and confusion in the outskirts of Victoria Falls as a huge tract of land falling under the Hwange Rural District council communal areas have been excised by the ministry of local government. The promulgation of statutory instrument 46 of 2026 on the excision of land in Hwange has seen the value of the land in the area skyrocketing in anticipation of huge development and international investment appetite rising in the area. The removal of the land from a communal land status to a state land status is the subject matter of this opinion. The fear and anxiety on the minds of so many people comes from a failure to understand the legal effect of the changeover of status of the land from communal land to state land. The legal meaning of the change and the effect on development that it shall have will be gleaned from a socio political and legal angle in this discourse. This opinion does not constitute legal advice but a discussion that requires further examination as the events unfold.

Firstly, the excision must be put in context. Zimbabwe has various land zonation provided by the Constitution and various statutes. There is urban land, this is land controlled and alienated through a deed of grant to a local authority for it to use and sell to qualifying residents who in turn get title deeds or deeds of transfer from the local authority. There is a legal principle which says that no person can give away rights more than that which they have. What it means is that a local authority can only give title to land which they own through a deed of grant. Another category of land is called agriculture land. Section 72 of the Zimbabwe Constitution defines this land as land suitable for agriculture, horticulture, viticulture, forestry…. But it does not include communal land, urban land nor land within an established township.

There is what is called communal land, this is land where traditional leaders have jurisdiction, authority or control over it in terms of section 282(2) of the Constitution. As the custodians of culture, the traditional leaders give leadership and play an environmental stewardship role in communal areas. In terms of ownership, communal land is vested in a President for the time being and such President exercises his powers over the land through the surveyor General’s office. An area becomes communal land once so declared by the President to be so. The other category is called state land. This is land where the state or some organ of state is given authority to take care of. Examples may include Parks estates, demarcated forestry and other land that may be under the authority of a Rural district council. The word rural is therefore a superordinate word which encompasses all these land categories other than urban land. The rural district council is therefore the general local planning authority for all these lands except where some statutes expressly exclude it.

The land under discussion has been communal land. At law, the rural district council and traditional leaders have no right to sell it nor to issue any title deeds to anyone in communal land. This position exists because they do not own the land that they preside over. They only have a right to administer and plan it but do not own it hence a prohibition from selling it. Any purported sale of communal land by the two institutions is void from the onset. As the country is moving towards an upper middle-income economy, there has been pressure from various people who want to invest in rural areas and require security of tenure. Councils have been issuing leases, but such are not sufficient security, especially for international investors. What all investors want are what is called real rights, thus title deed. The acquisition of title on communal land therefore follows various steps of which the first one is that of changing the status of the land from communal land to state land. That process is called excision. This is done because the law does not permit the sale of communal land in its state as communal land. Statutory instrument 46 of 2026 cited as the Communal land (excision of land) notice of 2026 removed some pieces of land from communal land and makes them state land. What it means is that traditional leaders no longer have control of that land as it now lies under the purview of the state. The next stage to be followed is that the land may now be wholly surveyed and its diagram be lodged with the Surveyor General’s office in Bulawayo. Thereafter, local government may lead in the planning of the surveyed land by setting out land reservations, i.e. setting aside zones and designating what those zones are for. Some examples of land reservations include public open spaces, industrial, residential and commercial. Under each reservation, uses are then designed as well. Any person who has a claim to land rights in the area may then have their specific stand title surveyed by a registered surveyor and subsequently, they may buy the land from the Ministry of Local Government, facilitated by the local authority in a legal process called conveyance.

The excision of land unlocks the value of the land and allows investors to buy and sell that land in the same way that one may deal with any property as provided in section 71 of the Constitution or in towns and cities. The government has discretion to either create a local authority that will preside over the excised land or allow the rural district council under which the land is to administer it. If however, there are communal homesteads that are within the excised land, the people who are lawfully staying in those areas are given other areas to settle in. The process follows certain legal stages that lead to compensation, first right of refusal to the scheme of development benefits and many others. One may only live in a communal area lawfully if either they are paying council dues or they are on a lease from council. The settlement itself should have been authenticated by minutes of a village assembly if the person came from elsewhere or if the person had a right of ancestral settlement in the area in 1983. One is also able to settle in any rural area if their spouse comes from that region. These conditions are set out in the Communal Land Act.

This is an Act of parliament which replaced the Tribal trust Lands Act which was extant during the colonial period. The excision of the pieces of land is a huge enabler to investment especially to the local people who are already resident in the zone . Most businesses who are operating in the excised area have been holding rural district council long leases based on non-title surveys. Some, however, had gone ahead of time and title surveyed their lands. The excision resonates well with the the United Nations Agenda 2030 on sustainable development and Zimbabwe’s vision 2030 which emphasis that no place or people will be left behind as the country moves towards an upper middle-class economy by 2030.