Good afternoon. It was not a coincidence that President Filipe Nyusi chose Maputo province’s Moamba district in which to make a speech warning about the dangers of land speculation yesterday (see below). The district is home to rich agricultural land, which would be ideal for farming, but whose titles have been snapped up by people who just sit on the land, waiting for someone to come along and offer them money to take it over for development. In the meantime, nothing grows. The story is the same in other parts of the country, with land that could be used for housing or for commercial or industrial buildings.
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If Nyusi was right to raise the problem, he could have been more honest about where it comes from. Many of the people guilty of sitting on land and preventing its development are far from strangers to him, as they are war veterans and other senior figures in the ruling Frelimo party. These people rarely miss a chance to use their political connections to grab valuable land, aided by the fact that Mozambique has no private land ownership regime. Instead, people wishing to take possession of a plot of land have to apply to the local authorities for the title. For political elites, this is easy to do and costs nothing, although foreign investors also engage in it.
