The Many Land Acquisition Laws of Zanzibar: Is There an Innermost Objective?

Abstract

Private land rights or interests are protected under the Constitution of Zanzibar 1984 (article 17). These rights or interests, when owned as per the laws, are not to be forcefully acquired by the government, save for need of the public. Each land acquisition law in Zanzibar has its own objective, distancing itself with another land acquisition law, and making it worse, even contrary to the Constitution of Zanzibar 1984. Though all land acquisition laws claim to be attaining the public need, they apply different phrases, meaning that they have different objectives. There exists an extended list of these objectives: national interest, public purpose, public use, private purpose (company or investment), ancient preservation and disaster management. A thorough analysis of the land acquisition laws is made in this study, which are the Land Tenure Act 1992, the Land Acquisition Decree 1909, the Town and Country Planning Decree 1955, the Zanzibar Investment Promotion and Protection Act 2004, the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act 2002 and the Disasters Management Act 2003. After the analysis, as well as referencing relevant case laws, this study tries to recommend using ‘public interest’ introduced by the Constitution of Zanzibar 1984 as the innermost objective, to clean up the confusion.