Eddie Cross
Not least of these is the housing boom which has raged here in the past decade. When you visit Nairobi the building boom is very evident – the construction cranes litter the horizon. Not in Zimbabwe, in fact I have only seen building cranes on two sites in the past decade – one on the new regional headquarters of Afrexim Bank in Harare and an industrial site in Bulawayo.
But we consume millions of tonnes of cement, bricks and stone and everywhere you look there are buildings going up. Mainly family housing. I estimate that over 1,5 million homes are either built or are under construction in our urban areas, and most of this development is on State owned land. The decision to give these families title has massive implications.
Since then, the President has appointed a Cabinet Committee to oversee the program consisting of the Ministers of Finance, Housing, Local Government and Justice. They in turn have established a working committee of all the agencies involved and invited the private sector to help with the process. This element is represented by the Kwangu/Ngakwami Presidential Title Deed Trust. This group has been working on this project for the past 20 months and a start has been made in the Epworth Town Board where 50 000 homes are to receive title.
Since that time, the program has been expanded to include the digitalisation of all 3,2 million existing title deeds, granting all informal housing title, converting urban municipal owned housing to freehold and granting all Rural Business Centres Title deeds. At least 6 million stands of land in urban, peri urban and rural areas will receive title in both paper and digital form. The combined value of these properties will run to several hundred million dollars, nearly all of it unencumbered and free of debt. This single exercise will do more to transform our economy than debt relief, or aid, or even investment.
Side from the impact on our economy, the impact on millions of families is going to be dramatic. Owning a home is the main objective of a family everywhere in the world. It will, in the majority of cases, be the largest investment owned by the families involved. Much of this development is being funded by our Diaspora population who send money home for building costs.
The Government has been enabling this process by allocating plots of land for home construction, now they are extending this to title deeds and ownership. Rwanda has done the same thing and has issued 3,2 million title deeds over land since Kagami came to power. The impact of this program on that small country does not need to be described. Rwanda is helping us with our program and has a technical team working in Harare with their technologies and electronic infrastructure. The University of Zimbabwe in Harare has established the technical capacity to provide us with plans of all urban centres down to an accuracy of 1 centimetre allowing us to provide accurate survey data at a very low cost, using drone and satellite technology.
One immediate result of this is that you do not see squatter camps and shacks here. Our people build decent homes, many brick under tile. This shows what you do when you give people a start in life with a resource, land, that you control. There is not a country in Africa that could not emulate what we are doing. I saw this once in India where an agency I was associated with bought land and allocated 50 square metres of land to each family and a US$500 loan.
In three years, a whole community had been established with three story homes. It gave dignity and worth to the poorest of the poor and 98 per cent of the building loans were repaid and recycled back into the Community. I spoke to a teenager in one home who described how they had lived under tin and plastic for over 20 years and then this had happened to them. She was in school and wanted to be a doctor.
Our urban communities are all suffering from an inadequate tax base and poor infrastructure. When you have towns and cities growing, as they do here, by 5 to 8 per cent per annum, meeting basic needs is a huge financial burden. The provision of roads, water, electricity, waste disposal, schools, clinics, hospitals , commercial and industrial sites. By creating property value, we are creating the capacity to meet these needs through the local authorities. The rates revenues will run to hundreds of millions of dollars. Our capacity to raise capital on a long term basis for financing infrastructure is all going to be possible.
The Trust is picking this up with a consortium of Banks and financial institutions to administer and finance the process. Contractors in all centres are being identified to undertake the work involved. Thousands of jobs will be created. Granting title and then providing all the basic services needed will create vibrant urban settlements with a better quality of life. Creating a middle income society as the President has stipulated as his goal for 2030, will strengthen our democracy and demand better local authority governance.
In this process we are creating a new, modern Deeds Office which will service our private sector and the national property sector properly. Every property owner will be able to access his records electronically. Local authorities will have an electronic register of properties and values in their administrative areas. Property transfers will be low cost and easy to give effect, helping create a vibrant market for property which will support lending and our whole financial industry.
An aspect which is receiving attention is how to give value to farm land in rural areas. This will probably be in the form of a 99 year lease which will be registered just like a title deed and be negotiable for banking purposes. Long term leases on this basis will give rural land owners real incentives to invest and the collateral to do so as well as to finance their annual needs. If we can achieve this together with the urban program, this will do more to transform Zimbabwe and raise living standards than anything else. It will truly form a legacy for this President which will yield dividends long after his retirement.
Post published in: Featured