Land Tenure Reform in Tanzania: Legal Problems and Perspectives

Abstract

In January 1991 President Ali Hassan Mwinyi appointed a Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters, under the chairmanship of Professor Issa Shivji, with extremely broad terms of reference. It was mandated not only to review laws and policies concerning the allocation, tenure, use, and development of land, and to make recommendations for reform, but also to examine the nature of the disputes that had arisen, and to propose measures for their solution. More generally, it was to hear complaints from the general public and to look into any other matters connected with land that it deemed appropriate. The appointment of the Commission might be interpreted as tacit official acknowledgement that the land policies of the preceding 25 years had, in many ways, been a failure, and that now was the time to formulate a new approach in keeping with the economic changes embraced in the mid-1980s