KOLLEH DAPONO, Margibi County – Residents of this community have been celebrating the last few months. After decades fighting the French-owned rubber company Salala that set up here in 1959, they finally have official ownership of their land.
By: Fatu Kamara with New Narratives
For decades, the plantation has expanded on the town’s eleven thousand acres of land, evicting families as it went. Now the community says it will have control of how the company operates.
“We are happy.“We have right over our land now,” says Fahn Kolleh, the 74-year-old town chief. Salala’s agreement with the government ends in 2029. “I told them I know my rights now and I am not under them.”
Yamah Keselee sings with joy as she digs cassava. Women had been excluded from land ownership before now. The new deed allows the 51-year-old widow and mother of seven to own this land and pass it to her children, including her daughters.
“I happy oo, I happy. We na suffer plenty. This one da good news for us.”
Yamah Keselee.
Kolleh Dapono’s experience is something communities across Liberia are hoping to emulate after the government passed the 2018 Land Rights Act giving traditional communities the right to apply for legal title to the lands they have lived on for generations. Kolleh Dapono is one of 16 that have achieved that status in the six years since the law passed.
But activists say the costs are so high and the process is so onerous it will be difficult for any more communities to attain land title without funding by international donors. Donors have shown little interest in funding land title efforts for another 150 communities that have been identified for title.
“This cannot be an initiative undertaken by communities because they don’t have the resources to do so,” says James Mulbah, project coordinator for the Society for the Conservation of Nature, a Liberian civil society organization. “Somebody will tell you $US150,000 dollars but it also depends on the number of towns, clans or villages involved. The communities cannot afford that.”
Donors have been pushing back on the costs saying they must be reduced to a level that can be carried by communities if the process is to be sustainable.
“I drafted a budget for community formalization for one clan and submitted it to donors, under the USAID project,” says Mulbah. But the donor had expected a budget of $US50,000 to $75,000. “The budget could not be passed because it was so huge, like $130,000 dollars.”
Mulbah is one of many civil society activists calling on stakeholders in the land rights sector to go back to the drawing board and engage the Liberia Land Authority to explore ways to shorten the steps, lessen the burden on communities, and cut down the costs.
The new law sets out six steps communities must follow to obtain their customary land deeds.
Communities must first identify themselves as a village, town or clan, identify their boundary with neighbors and establish a governance structure, according to Land Authority Executive Director Stanley Toe.
“From there the community will have to do what we call land use planning for their community,” Toe says. “And then the most crucial: boundary harmonization followed by confirmatory survey of that land. Then is the registration process where the deed or title to that particular land will have to be registered by the Liberia Land Authority.”
But all of that takes a lot of time and effort. Kolleh Dapono was supported by a consultant, James Morris, to meet the requirements of the Act. With funding from donors Morris worked with the community for more than a year to complete all the steps. Even still, there were final hurdles. Indeed, even though Kolleh Dapono has completed all the required steps, it is yet to be issued the deed to their community.
“It’s not valid because after the process there were individuals who came claiming to have properties within the community,” says Esther Godu, Liberia Land Authority’s team lead for the formalization of Kolleh Dapono. Godu said she had asked those claimants to submit evidence of their claims but expected the community’s deed would be issued this month.
Godu said she was unable to give a precise figure for the final cost of the community’s deed. But Morris is in no doubt that it was substantial. He said there were many documents and processes required that the community was not able to complete on their own.
Those costs are out of the range of rural communities who mostly survive by subsistence farming. The World Bank and UN provided funding in 2022 to help the first sixteen communities, including Kolleh Dapono, obtain their ownership in Margibi, Bong, Nimba, Sinoe, Maryland, Grand Cape Mount and Rivercess counties. Communities on the wait list are becoming increasingly worried about the fate of their claims as donor projects fade out. Their concerns are well placed according to Land Authority Executive Director Toe. He told Front Page Africa/New Narratives that the government has not done much to help these additional communities through the process of getting statutory deeds.
“The first four communities were deeded through the assistance of the World Bank,” Toe says. “This was a pilot project. Another eight communities were deeded in the southeast under a UN sponsored project. We have not gotten enough support from the government to carry on this process.”
Since American settlers arrived in 1822, Liberia has been plagued by disputes over land. Early governments made all land public disregarding the rights of communities that have lived there for generations. After the civil wars of 1990s, the government established the Land Commission and in 2018 signed the Land Rights Act giving women and communities the right to claim ownership of their land.
It was hoped that the land title process would reduce conflicts between communities and between communities and extractives companies and stop women from being evicted from land after husbands and family died. Salala Rubber is one of few very old concessions signed decades ago with the government of Liberia which was legally the owner of all undeeded land. The concession predates the Land Rights Law by sixty years. Kolleh Dapono suffered two major evictions since Salala arrived after signing an agreement with the Liberian government which officially owned the land.
Since then there have been numerous disputes. In 2019, the town and twenty-two other communities filed a complaint against Salala with the World Bank that women were being sexually harassed by Salala employees. The communities also alleged that the company took their land without consent, dumped pesticides into their drinking water and used local police to harass and intimidate anyone who spoke out. The company denied the allegations.
Communities across the country are now looking to the Boakai administration, the Land Authority and donors to come up with solutions that will help them also enjoy the benefits that were promised in the Land Rights Act.
This story was a collaboration with New Narratives. Funding was provided by the US and Swedish embassies. The funders had no say in the story’s content.
