Liberia: Campaigner Ali Kaba Honored for Role in Creating Land Rights Act

MONROVIA – Ali Kaba whose work at the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI) helped establish the Land Rights Act of 2018—hailed across the world for its recognition of customary and women’s land ownership—has been honored for his contribution to the sector, as he seeks a doctoral degree in the United States.

Kaba won a scholarship to earn a doctor or philosophy (PhD) in development studies at the School of International Services (SIS) at the American University in Washington D.C. In the next few years, he will study customary land governance, rural migration, foreign investment, and sustainable land use and natural resource management.

Commendations have been pouring in for him ahead of his departure on this Sunday.

“Kaba contributed immensely to the various policy discussions and the many public consultations that culminated to the Land Rights Policy and later the Land Rights Act,” said Stanley Toe, executive director of the Liberia Land Authority (LLA) in an interview with FrontPage Africa on Monday. He also extoled Kaba’s role in the regulations of the law, which has yet to be approved. “During the discussions, he brought tremendous insights, especially issues pertaining to natural resources, both in the land the forestry sector.”

“[Kaba] has been a committed practitioner and advocate for the formal recognition of customary land rights,” remarked Dr. Yohannes Gebremedhin, chief of party of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) program, Land Governance Activity Support (LGSA), via email. “He has passionately supported a number of communities in different counties in Liberia to satisfy the requirements prescribed by the Land Rights Act to formalize their customary land rights. He has also worked tirelessly to improve the management of land and forest resources in Liberia…”  

Silas Siakor, the country representative of the Dutch nongovernmental organization IDH said Kaba’s parting was good news.

“It is a major step forward for him personally and for the NGO community,” Siakor told FrontPage Africa on the margins of the honoring program SDI held for him recently Congo Town. “One of the advantages that we are now seeing from a well-educated and well-informed civil society is that you are in a better position to influence national policy and legislations and implementation if … come to the table with very clear ideas, recommendation for policy, lawmaking and implementation.

“Going away to add to the wealth of knowledge that he already has, it is a big deal. I hope he comes back better, stronger, and more informed technically to do the work that we all started.”

Loretta Pope-Kai, Chairperson of the National Civil Society Council of Liberia, who worked with Kaba on a program to help customary communities formalize their land rights, commended Kaba for guiding Fessibu into completing the formalization process for its deed. The town in Zorzor District, Lofa County became the first community in Liberia to do so in June earlier this year.

“He is not just leaving the space empty,” remarked Pope-Kai. “He is leaving and we now have a success story in Fessibu.”   

Nora Bowier, SDI coordinator, praised Kaba for his contributions to SDI’s role in the land sector.

“He has a been a great asset so he leaves a gap,” Bowier, who replaces Kaba as head of SDI’s community land protection program, said in an interview. “However, that’s a transition that has been discussed for a while. We are prepared.”

For his part, Kaba pledged commitment to land rights advocacy. “I am not leaving the sector,” he said in remarks at the honoring program. “Land is the second-most important resource after human beings, and it is everything that is wrong with Africa and it is everything that is also promising about Africa.”

Pioneer, Mentor and Ideologue

Kaba had just completed his mater’s degree in international development at the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, Colorado, United States of America when he was employed by SDI in 2010 to head a research project on the state of customary land tenure in Liberia. By then, the Liberia Land Authority was the newly formed Land Commission. Kaba helped create and led SDI’s land rights program. The program was SDI’s first work in land rights advocacy after a successful campaign in the reform of Liberia’s forestry industry, rocked by years of a deadly civil war. In the decade ahead, Kaba’s work would span over 70 communities in seven counties. It would also extend to land-related initiatives in a number of African countries, largely developing and implementing innovative rural land governance projects.

Kaba and his SDI team worked with communities, helping them organize and complete the formalization process for customary-land rights in the then Public Land Law. He and his team learned that the process was not only costly for communities but exposed the risks of over-centralization, influence of public officials, and abuse.  

It was in the resulting work of that program he co-authored a book—Protecting Community Land and Resources – Evidence from Liberia…—that would become a bible for community land rights and tenure in Liberia. His recommendations for communities’ by-law and constitution, and self-identification—where communities establish themselves as a chiefdom, clan or standalone towns or villages to legalize their tenure rights— would make their way into the Land Rights Act eight years later.

“That also laid the foundation for civil society engagement in the whole lawmaking process,” said Siakor, who worked at the SDI at the time and interviewed Kaba for the job. “Through that, SDI a real voice at the table where land tenure reform was being discussed because we were doing the research on the ground, we had a lot of knowledge from the frontlines and we put all of that to bay.

“[Ali Kaba] is a pioneer of the whole process that is laid out in the customary land formalization,” Siakor said. 

During his years at SDI, Kaba formed a relationship with the Land Authority, and a number of national and international institutions, including Rights and Resource Institute (RRI), the University of Michigan, Tetra Tech, NAMATI, USAID and OXFAM.

“He came as a starter; he leaves as a pioneer,” Bowier said.  

James Yarsiah of the Rights and Rice Foundation and member of the Civil Society Land Rights Working Group, who alongside Kaba led a sustained campaign in three years for the passage into the Land Rights Act, said he was a “mentor and ideologue in the quest for land rights.” He said nothing could have been achieved without Kaba.

However, Yarsiah, one of the oldest civil society actors in the country, rued Kaba’s departure amid challenges in the implementation of the law.

“[Kaba] is leaving two years after the passage of the Land Rights Act, where there is not clarity where regulations are, no transparency on how regulations are done, communities that have suffered and gone through formalized process basically are being denied to be recognized,” he said. “Could everything we have done happen without Ali [Kaba] and his institutional setup? I am not sure,” Yarsiah said. “Can [the challenges ahead] be achieved without Ali? That is our challenge.”