IN Zambia, like elsewhere in the world, land is a very important component of livelihood people cannot do without.
In some instances, land can even be compared to fresh air which human beings breath, meaning, as it does, that one cannot do without it.
This is precisely because everything that revolves around humans is land-based.
For instance, people need land for houses and housing, like food and clothing, is a basic human need.
In addition, human beings need land to construct such things as roads, offices, shops, radio and in this modern era, mobile phone transmitter masts.
As if all these are not enough, people must, of necessity, have land to produce food, fibre, timber and energy – to name just a few – all of which they depend upon for their existence.
For these reasons and, unlike air which people just basically need for breathing, land perhaps matters more because people buy and sell it.
To illustrate the importance of land, only a decade ago, a small piece of land to build a three-bed-roomed house in Lusaka could be bought from an individual at less than K3 million (non-rebased).
Today, the same plot of bare land is fetching as high as K130 million (K130,000).
Land today tends to have such a huge price tag for one major reason: If you have land, this is considered to be one way of lifting oneself out of poverty.
It is an indisputable fact that land enables one to have access to locations, meaning that if you own land in an urban environment, for instance, you will have access to a lot more goods and services in the surrounding environment than if you own land in a rural area.
Yet in the same fashion, those in the rural areas have also massive benefits from owning land. This is because almost all people in the rural areas depend on land to produce crops, the surplus of which is sold for them to earn an income.
And the fact that Zambia is looking forward to becoming an agricultural economy makes the issue of land even more crucial.
More and more urban dwellers are heading to rural areas in search of farmland. It has now become fashionable, especially for well-to-do urbanites to have two homes – one in the city and another in the rural area where they go from time to time to grow crops.
It is, therefore, not surprising that land wrangles have become an everyday occurrence both in rural and urban areas.
It is clear to all and sundry that land matters. And the announcement by Chifubu Member of Parliament Susan Kawandami, who is also the Deputy Minister for Chiefs and Traditional Affairs, that the Government has degazetted 6,000 hectares of forest reserve in Kaniki area to be allocated to small-scale farmers, is a very welcome news.
These are some of the people who previously had no land because they simply had been squatting in this forest reserve, and there was every likelihood that they may eventually be evicted.
Now the Kaniki residents have surely been given a lifeline by the Government, the gesture that must be commended not only because these people will now have legal ownership of this land but also because they will use it for their own economic benefit and that of the country as a whole.
We, therefore, join Ms Kawandami in hoping that these new emerging farmers will improve their living standards and positively contribute to the economy of Zambia.
