Multiparty elections and land patronage: Zimbabwe and Côte d'Ivoire

Abstract

This paper aims at some general understanding of the phenomenon of politicians using land rights as a patronage resource in attempts to mobilise electoral support. Using Zimbabwe and Côte d'Ivoire as case studies, it argues that the increasing visibility of land as a patronage resource in African multiparty elections may be at least partly explained by the convergence of three specific constraints and incentives confronting politicians. First, weak legal restraints on rulers’ ability to allocate land rights create opportunities for politicians to use land as a patronage resource. Second, competitive multiparty elections mean that politicians must work to mobilise constituency support in order to win. Third, the dwindling fiscal capacity of the state can heighten the attractiveness of land as a patronage resource. Land can be offered as a patronage resource even when state coffers run low.

Keywords:

• land
• elections
• violence
• ethnicity
• Côte d'Ivoire
• Zimbabwe

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their reviewers for very helpful comments.

Notes

In many places, the change over time constitutes a difference of degree rather than kind, since elections in Africa's one-party states were sometimes competitive and created incentives for rulers to invest resources to ensure voter turnout.

For example, Côte d'Ivoire, a French colony, had a relatively smooth route to independence in 1960; Zimbabwe, a British colony, became independent in 1980 after a war. The substantial private ownership of rural land by white settlers and racial land inequities that were a colonial legacy in Zimbabwe were not factors in Côte d'Ivoire at independence. Zimbabwe has had multiparty elections since independence in 1980; post-colonial Côte d'Ivoire reintroduced multiparty politics in 1990. On Kenya, see Boone (forthcoming).

We do not claim that the use of land as a patronage resource is a wholly new phenomenon.

Land conflicts in Zimbabwe's communal areas, as in Côte d'Ivoire, often revolve around newcomers and ‘indigènes’, and have an electoral dimension. See Nyambara (2001, 2002); Chimhowu (2002); Spierenburg (2004).

Selby (2006) notes one-third of white farmers left in the transition to majority rule.

Kriger (2007) provides examples of how ZANU PF used land resettlement to foster its party-building agenda.

Kriger (2003), for example, describes how the civil service was Africanised and almost tripled in size between 1980 and 1989, providing ZANU PF with patronage resources.

The purpose of land designation was to facilitate the acquisition of large blocks of land for settlement schemes and planning.

Alexander (2006) and Sachikonye (2003) emphasise the spontaneity of the land occupations.

Farmers often mounted successful Administrative Court challenges against land designations because government failed to comply with its own criteria and the Land Acquisition Act.

Thaker is an economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Between 2000 and 2008, the central bank engaged in quasi-fiscal activities, printing massive amounts of money to finance government expenditure.

It came to light in early 2009, when the government of national unity had been established, that ZANU PF had put 29,000 youth militia members on the civil servants’ payroll (see Guma, 2009).

See also Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum and the Justice for Agriculture Trust (2007) for three surveys that showed the low significance of the land issue for the overwhelming majority of the population.

There is a literature on how ZANU PF propaganda divided the nation into ‘patriots’ who had political and economic rights, and ‘traitors’ who had neither (e.g. Ranger, 2004).

In November 2000 (within the required six months), parliament passed the Land Acquisition Act (COHRE, 2001; Human Rights Watch, 2002).

Human Rights Watch (2002) describes the Rural Occupiers (Protection from Eviction) Act, 2001 and amendments made to the Land Acquisition Act by Mugabe in November 2001.

Scarnecchia (2006: 227) notes: ‘During the initial distribution of land parcels in the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, participants from the communal areas were told their names had to be on the ZANU-PF registry in order to qualify for the new land’.

Operation Murambatsvina (clear out the filth) demolished homes and informal businesses in urban areas to punish urban voters for rejecting ZANU PF in the March 2005 election.

On European plantation agriculture in Côte d'Ivoire, see Anyang'Nyong'o (1987). On land law, see Chauveau (2000, 2002a), Toulmin and Quan (2000), Lewis (2003), and Boone (2003).

On the political intervention of the state to ‘maintain the fiction of the tutorat system’ (i.e. the role of the Houphouet regime in resisting the formalisation of conventions for land rights delegation, e.g. sales, leasing), see Chauveau (2000, 2002a, 2002b) and Lewis (2003).

This area is the political epicentre of the Ivoirien southwest. Land dynamics in the extreme southwest (Bas-Sassandra Region, Department of San Pedro and Tabou) are similar to those in the Gagnoa-Daloa-Divo region. In the extreme southwest, however, land-related pressures are compounded by parastatal and private investment in large-scale plantation agriculture. Plantation agriculture, which occupied approximately two-thirds of the cultivated area in the Department of Tabou in 2001 (Babo & Droz, 2008), aggravated tensions in the smallholder sector in this area by acting as a magnet for in-migrants to the region and by enclosing land that otherwise would have been open to smallholder expansion (see Schwartz, 2000; Woods, 2003; Babo & Droz, 2008; Babo, forthcoming). On the southeast, see Colin et al. (2007).

See Dozon (1985) and Marshall-Fratani (2006) inter alia. Some analysts believe that between 4000 and 6000 Bété farmers were killed. Strozeski (2006) reports this version of events. Indigène–stranger land relations were clearly an issue in the Gagnoa uprising (see Dozon, 1985).

At this time, about 25 per cent of the total population of about 15–16 million was classified as non-Ivoirien.

Crook (1997) says that non-Ivoiriens had always been allowed to vote. In 1960–1961, a wave of protest over foreigners’ right to vote (and to government employment) swept Abidjan.

That indigenous Ivoiriens should reclaim the land has been the ‘consistent stance’ of the FPI since the end of the 1980s (Human Rights Watch, 2003).

Turnout rate in 1990 was 69 per cent, with Houphouet's official share of the vote at 81.7 per cent. The FPI, led by Gbagbo, got 18 per cent of the vote (Fauré, 1993).

In the 1990 presidential election, the FPI got 50 per cent of the vote in the Agni region (Fauré, 1993).

As Campbell (2003) emphasises, the economic context of recession and attempts on the part of external creditors to impose austerity on government spending constrained Bédié's options for mobilising electoral support. For the external creditors, one goal of the austerity programmes was to limit the ability of the government to use public funds to fuel its patronage machine. Campbell argues that the resort to Ivoirité was an explicitly political gambit that reflected these constraints on using economic policy (or debates over economic policy) to mobilise voters. Under Structural Adjustment Programs in the mid-1990s, the government budget deficit was reduced from USD 280 million in 1993 to USD 57 million in 1995. In 1996, there was a budget surplus of USD 23 million (International Monetary Fund, 2005). Over the 1985–1998 period, poverty rates soared, income gaps widened (International Monetary Fund and International Development Association, 2002), and the quality of public services – including secondary and tertiary education – declined precipitously.

Baldé (n.d.) reports a 45 per cent turnout rate in the 1996 legislative elections. The PDCI ended up with 146 deputies, the FPI with 14, and the RDR with 14.

In 1998, the definition of citizen as opposed to foreigner was at the very heart of the larger struggle over the state. Thus, the practical meanings of the terms ‘non-citizen’ and ‘citizen’ that appeared in the 1998 land law were open to interpretation by whoever controlled the government that would eventually implement and enforce the legislation. RDR legislators would surely invoke this justification for voting for the law, as could PDCI legislators who had Baoulé constituents who had acquired land rights as non-autochthones in the southwest. The RDR was more or less trapped by the language of the law, since to protest the ownership clause in the law would be to suggest that RDR legislators had doubts about the nationality status of their supporters.

Stamm (2000: 21) notes (as a caveat in a favourable review of the land law that does not mention the citizenship provision) that ‘[i]t is to be feared that usage rights of unlimited or long-term duration will be modified or withdrawn in reaction to the new legislation’.

Bassett (2003a) reports that the 1998 census showed that 5 of Côte d'Ivoire's 19 administrative regions had non-Ivoirien populations of over 250,000: the Lagunes region (which includes Abidjan), Haut-Sassandra (Daloa), Bas Sassandra (Soubré and San Pedro), Sud-Bandama (Divo), and Sud Comoé (Aboisso, Bonoua, Grand Bassam). Calls for expropriation of foreigners and restitution of native land rights resonated in the southeastern coastal strip, and especially in the administrative region of Sud-Comoé (Bonoua), where heavy migration from Burkina Faso in the 1960s and 1970s had helped drive the development of commercial agriculture.

On the political effects of economic recession see Campbell (2000, 2003), Gyimah-Boadi and Daddieh (1999), and Boone (2007). It is true that by sponsoring the 1998 land law, the PDCI was jeopardising the interests of Baoulé migrant farmers in the southwest. The International Crisis Group (2005: 11) reported that in the Far West, land-related tension between ‘authentically Ivoirien’ Baoulé settlers and the Guéré who are indigenous to this region was higher than it was between Guéré and Burkinabé immigrants. In the wake of waves of violence against in-migrants, especially Baoulé, that started in 1994, many Baoulé farmers left the southwest to return to their villages d'origine (see Babo & Droz 2008; Babo, forthcoming). Babo & Droz (2008) argue that PDCI politicians used tournées de sensibilisation about the new land law in the southwest to focus autochthones’ land frustrations on foreigners (Burkinabé and Malian) rather than on their ‘Baoulé brothers’.

International Crisis Group (2006). On Guéi's background and intra-junta politics leading up to the election, see N'Diaye (2005).

Robinson and Verdier (2002) make precisely this point about government allocation of land to smallholders when they refer to the example of the Mexican land reforms of the 1930s.