Abstract: This paper discusses the land rights of the Borana pastoralists as an example of pastoral land tenure in Ethiopia. Pastoral tenure rights are usually a simplified version of much more complex tenurial arrangements found in agricultural areas. The pre-eminence of state rights is characteristic of the situation. Pastoral tenure rights usually involve unclear group user rights to the resources, with poor legal protection from pastoral competitors or agricultural expansion into the rangelands.
The land base of the Boran pastoralists has been continuously diminished over the last century, partly because of political and military competition, more recently because of developmental approaches which on the one hand encourage alternative forms of land use (agriculture, land grants to `investors') and which on the other hand have ecological repercussions (bush encroachment) which remove large parts of the remaining land resources from Borana pastoralism. This paper argues that the Borana have inadequate protection from the land tenure legislation which does not take the requirements of pastoralism much into account.
Access to land is a vitally important issue for the many people in Ethiopia today who, one way or the other, depend on agricultural production for their income and sustenance. In Ethiopia, it is estimated that between 85 and 90% of employment is tied to agricultural production, including pastoralism. Land tenure issues therefore continue to be of central political and economic importance, as they have been at several crucial junctures in Ethiopia's history. The decisive significance of the land question was perhaps most explicitly expressed in the course of events leading to the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974. `Land to the Tiller' was the rallying cry of the opposition movement, which eventually prevailed and toppled the old regime. The subsequent 1975 Land Reform represents one of the most important events in modern Ethiopian history and its imprint still weighs heavily on the rural (as well as urban) communities. The issue of urban land ownership and the restitution of the `excess' urban housing nationalised in 1975 has come to the forefront lately, as a significant political issue in terms of social justice as well as a precondition for investments and economic development. Even so, the 1975 Land Reform no doubt has had its most significant social and economic impact in the arable farming sector of the country. Land tenure issues remain as a central, contentious and highly flammable political theme in Ethiopia, in national as well as regional politics, in both urban and rural contexts (see e.g. Ege, 1997).
Access to land and other natural resources is of course as important to pastoralists as to arable farmers. Pastoralists1 represent some 10-12% of Ethiopia's population, and approximately 40% of the land area of Ethiopia is considered suitable for pastoral land use only. But in line with the general social and political marginalisation of pastoralists in Ethiopia, land tenure issues as they refer to pastoral resources and grazing lands are not given the same attention in public policy. In the 1975 Land Reform proclamation, for instance, only 4 short articles (out of 33) are directed at the situation in the `nomadic lands'. In the new Ethiopian Constitution of 1994, no particular mention is made of the pastoral areas at all.
There are some good reasons for the pre-eminent attention given to agricultural lands in land tenure legislation in Ethiopia. Land is the overwhelmingly most important, valuable and scarce capital asset in agricultural production, on which the majority of the population depends. In pastoralism the most important capital asset is livestock, not land! In his seminal essay from 1973 on nomad-sedentary relations in the Middle East, Fredrik Barth furthermore points out that :
"... the time required to extract value from land is great in agriculture, so control over land is essential, while the time required by grazing is minimal, so control may well be precarious and ad hoc" ( Barth, 1973:13)
This observation of course reflects the empirical facts of land tenure systems in many situations also in Eastern Africa. While access to land is important to agriculturalists and pastoralists alike, the institutional arrangements governing access to and control over land resources are usually markedly different. Codified land tenure legislation in the region is primarily preoccupied with tenure of agricultural lands and to the extent that land issues are brought into the public domain, such as in policy debates, legislation or litigation, the issues usually concern agricultural lands. Pastoral land tenure is at best a simplified version of the tenure regime in the agricultural areas; a situation where tenure rights to pastoral lands are simply appropriated and held by the state is very common.
The exact content of the rights appropriated by the state is a moot point. Pastoralists may have more or less clearly defined rights of access and use, but the pre-eminence of the rights of the state to do as it pleases with pastoral lands is usually not in question. Sometimes user rights are explicitly attached to social groups, i.e. land rights (such as they are) are an aspect of group membership (often according to some definition of ethnic groups) and sometimes the state even creates such groups1 for the specific purpose of owning land and developing it.
At present, land rights in the pastoral areas of Ethiopia seem to be a matter of loosely defined group rights which are granted to named ethnic groups by the hegemonic state without taking locally evolved tenure rights, if and where these exist, much into consideration.
In strictly legal terms, all pastoral lands are owned by the state on behalf of the peoples of Ethiopia. The 1994 Constitution guarantees access to land for all Ethiopians who want to earn a living from farming, but leaves it to subsidiary legislation to specify the terms and conditions under which land is made available to users. Such subsidiary legislation has not yet been promulgated in the Oromiya Regional State which encompasses several pastoral societies, including Borana. The general provisions of the Constitution thus grants the state plenty of leeway to do as it pleases with pastoral lands.
It may be argued that the pre-eminence of the state also persists in relation to agricultural lands (i.e. the state can do as it pleases also here). One should bear in mind, however, that the elaboration and codification of lands rights which apply to agricultural lands, place legal restrictions on the state, to an extent which is not found in the pastoral areas. The payment of agricultural land tax, for instance, provides a large measure of legal protection and security of tenure for farmers in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia has historically been home to complex land tenure systems governing ownership, control, administration and the extraction of value from agricultural lands; these issues have been far less elaborated on as far as the pastoral lands are concerned. Although approximately half of the land area of Ethiopia today is primarily being used for pastoral production, and is being inhabited by pastoral societies, this has not always been so. The much smaller historical `core' areas of Ethiopia are in the agricultural highland areas of the north of the country. Historically, the Ethiopian state has always rested on an agricultural foundation. Ethiopian traditions, as well as current practices with regard to land tenure, therefore have a strong agricultural bias. The distribution of land rights was of central political and economic importance in the context of the agricultural societies of Northern and Central Ethiopia and all subsequent land tenure legislation and practical tenurial arrangements of the Ethiopian state have inevitably been strongly influenced by this background.
The pastoral areas of Ethiopia have only recently been incorporated into the Ethiopian state, over the past century or so, through military campaigns of various intensity. All lands added to the Empire during these campaigns, including agricultural lands, were initially seen by the Ethiopian state as the legitimate spoils of war. Land rights in the agricultural areas were used to reward the army and have, since incorporation, undergone a number of transformations (the last of which was the 1975 Land Reform). The feudal administration of the pastoral areas was organised along different lines and the pastoral areas have remained as lands simply classified as lands belonging to the Ethiopian state. As such, they were incorporated into Ethiopian legislation and the Ethiopian land tenure system.
At the time of incorporation of the southern regions of Ethiopia into the Ethiopian state, lands were granted as fiefs to the feudal retainers of Emperor Menelik II, in reward for their services, to ensure their loyalty and to secure them a source of income. One should think of these land grants in terms of feudal privilege, which included the right to raise a feudal levy. Separate rights of taxation, which represented a distinct layer in a multi-layered system of rights, with different actors or agents (the Crown, the feudal nobility, the Church, feudal retainers, farmers and tenants) holding different rights to the same piece of land, were recognised in the feudal agricultural societies of Ethiopia. The feudal privilege to raise a levy, which involved different types of taxation, with parts of the proceeds going to the Crown and parts being used for the administration of the land in question (and parts being the personal income of the retainer in question) must be distinguished from ownership and/or user rights.
Initially the main difference between the pastoral and the agricultural areas of the south was that feudal privileges were distributed on the basis of land in the agricultural areas, while in the pastoral areas they depended on the system of `qutre gabbar', which literally means `counting of tenants'. This distinction laid down the basis for major differences in the way land rights in southern Ethiopia evolved at later stages in the history of the area. The feudal privileges in the pastoral areas were based on numbers of people (or `taxpayers') and were not based on the distribution of productive assets, such as land, as was the case in the agricultural communities. More importantly, however, when the feudal privileges were withdrawn in these pastoral areas there were no residual user rights involved. In other parts of Ethiopia temporary feudal privileges to raise levy over time blurred into semi-permanent and inheritable users rights and ownership rights. With the modernisation and bureaucratisation of the Ethiopian administration, which involved the withdrawal of feudal privileges, the former feudal retainers were not able to claim ownership rights, or any other residual user rights, in the pastoral areas, where the basis of the feudal levy had been people rather than land. To the extent this happened at all in the pastoral areas of southern Ethiopia, ownership rights were retained by soldier-settlers only in the pockets of agricultural land which had been created around some of the military garrison towns.
Because of ecological constraints, primarily poor and erratic rainfall, the pastoral areas (except for these more generously endowed pockets of good land) could not be used for agricultural production and the issue of land ownership as such did not arise. In other conquered areas, where post-conquest land awards involved large tracts of productive agricultural lands, the distinction between income arising from taxation rights and income arising from ownership was more confused. In these areas ownership rights were retained even if taxation rights reverted to the state. In the conquered areas of Southern Ethiopia which could be used for arable agriculture extensive sharecropping arrangements became the normal mechanism of exploitation, securing the nobility and their retainers an income also after the modernisation of the administration and the withdrawal of taxation rights. Sharecropping contracts which stipulated land rent to the nominal owner of up to half of the annual production were common.1
Hence, the less favourable ecological conditions in the pastoral areas, perhaps in combination with an agricultural bias in the economic outlook of the soldier-settlers, seem to have protected the pastoralists from the kind of harsh economic exploitation experienced by sharecroppers in the agricultural areas of Southern Ethiopia. Land ownership in the arid and hot lowlands was of limited interest to the Ethiopian feudal elite. One should also note that the Ethiopian state, which transferred control of the most important capital asset in agriculture (viz. land) to the soldier-settlers in other colonial contexts in Southern Ethiopia, did not attempt to confiscate the equivalent capital asset in pastoralism, which is livestock. To the extent that animals were confiscated (which happened frequently) they were simply taken out of the pastoral contexts and consumed. There seem to have been very few examples (if any) of soldier-settlers engaging in pastoral production as an economic enterprise, e.g. on the basis of confiscated livestock and corvee labour, which would have been the parallel to agricultural share-cropping. There were obviously economic linkages between the soldier-settlers and the pastoralists (trade, and some contract herding on behalf of townspeople) but the soldier-settlers, who became a new land-owning elite in the agricultural areas, were never integrated in the local economy in the pastoral areas of Ethiopia.
One result of this situation is the paradox that Ethiopian pastoralists, who inhabit the poorest parts of the country as far as natural resources and productivity are concerned, have probably enjoyed a better standard of living, in terms of health and nutrition, as well as access to natural resources and economic assets, than neighbouring agricultural communities living on much more productive land.
The Borana1 were incorporated into the Ethiopian Empire through a swift and not particularly violent military campaign conducted by one of Emperor Menelik's generals (fitawrari Hapte Georgis) in 1897, primarily to counter the threat of British advances from the South. The Borana did not have access to modern firearms and had been thoroughly terrorised by the devastating effects of rifle fire a few years earlier, so they quickly surrendered to Menelik's forces. Borana became the fief of fitawrari Hapte Georgis, who received it as a reward for his valour in the Battle of Adua in 1896. A system of indirect rule was established, through which the appointed Borana representatives of the feudal suzerain were charged with maintaining the peace as well as the collection and delivery of local tribute. Part of the feudal levy went to maintain a small garrison in Borana, but in general the Borana were left to their own devices.
There was minimal interference from the central government in the affairs of Borana, from the conquest in 1897, through the period of feudal administration before the Second World War and the period of bureaucratic modernisation after the war, right up to the Ethiopian Revolution in 1974. The main concern of the Ethiopian state throughout this period was the establishment and maintenance of the border to Kenya, while the relationship to the Borana pastoralists was characterised more than anything else by benign neglect. In spite of its great wealth in livestock, Borana was isolated and not easily accessible, and since it was not easily exploitable through the usual means of soldier-settler agriculture, Borana was probably not even perceived of as a significant source of income for the Ethiopian state.
As far as the Borana themselves were concerned, the Ethiopian occupation meant an onerous tax burden1 and the presence of some soldiers in the small garrison towns. There were also a number of soldier-settlers in the most favourable pockets of land where arable farming was possible. The appointment of feudal representatives (called `balabbat's) from the lineages of the semi-sacred and ideally apolitical Kallus1 also represented a clear break with Borana tradition, but in general terms the Borana were left alone to run their own affairs. In local terms, the greatest difficulties were created by the appointed individuals from the Kallu's lineage, who started to use the office of balabbat to gain illegitimate and undue influence over other parts of the Borana socio-political system, e.g. the selection of Gada1 officials.
The Ethiopian state in effect set up a system of indirect rule in Borana, with the `balabbat's mediating relations between the Borana and the Ethiopian state in a fairly narrow band of issues which primarily concerned the maintenance of local law and order as well as taxation. In the feudal era, before World War II, tribute or the feudal levy involved a comparatively broad spectrum of goods and services (including corvee labour for local soldier-settlers) on the basis of the number of people, while later on, with the introduction of a bureaucratic, salaried national administration, taxes on the basis of livestock holdings were to be paid in cash. But beyond the small number of issues which were seen as `Government business' (taxation, security) the Borana were able to maintain their own traditions and institutions in all important spheres of life. Most importantly, resource management, in particular access to and use of water and pasture were governed by Borana institutions. The soldier-settlers had their attention on arable farming and did not attempt to establish themselves in the pastoral sector. In retrospect, it seems that the pastoral economy of the Borana was sufficiently robust to carry the additional burden of Ethiopian taxation, without too much local hardship. Neither feudal levies, nor taxation more properly understood, certainly did not reach levels which threatened animal reproduction and herd growth or in other ways undermined the local livestock economy.
Incorporation into the Ethiopian state did mean an additional tax burden on the Borana, in addition to the voluntary contributions1 regularly raised by the Borana themselves in support of their own social institutions. There were, however, also some advantages. The Ethiopian state assumed responsibility for local security, and at a later stage assigned and demarcating home territories for various competing pastoral groups, as well as forcibly maintaining these borders. For the Borana this implied military assistance and protection from the expansion of Somali groups along the eastern borders of their territory. Since the middle of the 19th century, the once dominant Borana had been fighting a losing battle against the Somali advances and lost large areas of mostly wet-season pastures in the lowlands. The Ethiopian maintenance of the status quo clearly benefited the Borana. I have elsewhere pointed out how the Borana success in containing the Somali advances in this century primarily depended on the Borana submitting to the Ethiopian state (Helland, 1996: 145-49). Without the support and active intervention of the Ethiopian state the Borana would most likely have lost even more land, as well as the all-important permanent wells in the central dry-season areas.
As pointed out above, land tenure in a pastoral situation must meet somewhat different functional requirements than is the case in agriculture. Pastoral land use is to a large extent a matter of gaining access to resources for quite limited periods of time (the time required by grazing). Particularly under arid conditions, pastoral land use must be understood in terms of opportunistic resource exploitation and extraction of value from a volatile and highly unpredictable source rather than long-term management and care of land resources (cf. Behnke, Scoones & Kerven, 1993; Scoones, 1995). Given the great variation and uneven spatial distribution of rainfall, there are in a pastoral situation pronounced disadvantages to a land tenure system which ties specific individuals or groups of people to specific parcels of land. Land rights must therefore be articulated at the level of larger units, both in terms of people and land, leaving individuals with the necessary freedom and flexibility to seek out pasture and water where they occur, within such larger units.
Hence, pastoral land rights must be examined from at least two perspectives. For ecological reasons, a group's rights of access to a larger territorial unit are obviously important, so the issues of territorial integrity and protection of land from invaders are important. But in economic terms pastoral producers are responsible for their individual pastoral enterprises, so the question of gaining access and user rights to specific resources within the group territory, in competition with other similarly constituted individual units, is equally important.
In Borana, the issue of territorial integrity and protection of group rights has since the incorporation of Borana depended on the Ethiopian state. The state accepted that the Borana as a group have user rights to the their land, and has, on several occasions, upheld this recognition. As long as the Borana paid their taxes and otherwise kept the peace, there was thus no real challenge to these user rights as far as the Ethiopian state was concerned.. The Borana were able to keep their main competitors, the Somali, at bay (obviously more by implication than by design) by adapting to the political demands of the feudal empire of Menelik, to the modernising bureaucracy of Haile Selassie and the socialist state of Mengistu Haile Mariam. There were many incidents of tension and encroachment along the borders, particularly from Somali groups to the east throughout this period, but the Ethiopian state has, by and large, maintained the territorial integrity of Borana, particularly since World War II.
A major change took place with the demise of Mengistu Haile Mariam and the ascendancy of the current government, when the Borana for once found themselves out-manoeuvered by their Somali competitors.
The Derg regime had beaten back the most serious challenge in modern times to the territorial integrity of both the Ethiopian state and the Borana, in the 1977-78 war against the Somali. The beginning of the Derg era also coincided with the construction of two all-weather roads into Borana, with increased commerce and better integration with the rest of Ethiopia, including increased activity in both public and non-government development projects and famine relief. With the establishment of the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in 1987 Borana even became a separate administrative region. The Derg policy of encouraging local party structures (under the strict control of the official Worker's Party) and the opportunities which the significantly expanded state presence in Borana offered to aspiring educated, young Borana, to a large degree solidified Borana support for the Derg, in spite of high demands for taxes (and conscripts for the war in the north) and `voluntary contributions' for various unpopular causes. The Derg regime offered employment and career opportunities to hundreds of educated (and not so educated) Borana who staffed the various structures of the state and the party in Borana. This new layer of civil servants and functionaries had thus replaced the balabbats in mediating relations between the Borana and the state. Although the scope of their activities was circumscribed by state policies and party directives, they secured the Borana a public voice in their relations with the state, to the extent this was possible at all during the Derg regime.
With the change of government in 1991, the Borana state employees, party cadres and others with a stake in the existing system became politically suspect. There were calls for armed resistance, and although this has never amounted to more than minor irritants, the Borana as a group became suspect as well. Pastoralists going about their regular business in the bush were probably considerably less concerned about the changes than were the Borana educated elite.
At the same time, some of the Somali groups quickly declared their loyalty to the new government, thus enlisting government support for their cause and turning the tables on the Borana. Locally this implied the replacement of large numbers of Borana civil servants with fresh recruits from various minority groups residing in Borana1, while at the national level Somali territorial claims to large tracts of disputed border areas were accepted as legitimate. Parts of Borana were thus transferred to the newly formed Somali Regional State.
Perhaps one should not make too much of the significance of these border changes, because the Somali had actually `created political facts on the ground' by pushing quite far towards the west in the turmoil of the last few years of the Derg era. But the lack of national political support for the Borana cause, which this change indicates, has ramifications for the distribution of land rights within the Borana areas as well.
In Borana, land rights have always been an aspect of group membership, both when they were defined solely by Borana jurisprudence, as well as later, when locally defined land rights became secondary to national land tenure legislation. The land rights of individual Borana pastoralists were thus safeguarded as an aspect of Borana group rights, in particular in the period up to the 1975 Land Reform Proclamation.
The campaign aimed at implementing the Land Reform Proclamation in many parts of Ethiopia also took on an aspect of an administrative reform. In Borana this campaign subdivided the Borana lands into a large number of `peasant associations'. Initially these were known as `pastoral associations' but this distinction was soon forgotten, since national legislation or national policies never made any distinction between the two. And as the land management aspects of the Land Reform gave way to concerns of political control and the mobilisation of support in the peasant associations (including the extortion of increasing amounts of `voluntary' economic contributions), the distinction between the two forms of association receded completely.
With the 1975 Land Reform Proclamation land rights also in the pastoral areas became contingent on membership in the peasant/pastoral association, as was the case in the agricultural areas, but any practical implementation of this proved difficult and was soon ignored. It was for example suggested at one stage that the pastoralists should apply to the peasant/pastoral association for permission to move across the borders of the association, but this was not implemented.
Although the Derg regime supported the status quo as far as the border with the Somali was concerned, and the Land Reform Proclamation stated that `nomadic people shall have possessory rights to the land they customarily use for grazing or other purposes related to agriculture' (Article 24, Land Reform Proclamation, 1975), the Derg period saw the start of a number of processes which have led to land losses within Borana. The Borana have been able to maintain their own tenurial arrangements only on the grazing lands which the state allowed them to have. Land which the state needed for other purposes, e.g. roads, buildings, resettlement of destitute people, demarcation of ranches and holding grounds, or other development projects, was simply confiscated. Strictly speaking, there is no doubt about the legality of these practices, as far as national law is concerned, but from the Borana point of view, these confiscations meant a reduction in the amount of grazing available.
There were, however, some mitigating circumstances. First of all, the amount of land confiscated was limited, even if the land in question was often strategically important, e.g. as important dry-season reserves. Second, land losses were often compensated by other development inputs, in particular the digging of stock ponds in formerly inaccessible areas (albeit with long-term negative consequences). Third, land losses were usually a matter of reserving land for various public undertakings, which were presented by the educated Borana leadership as contributing to the development and prosperity of the Borana as a whole. An aspect of `development' in these terms was the substantial quantities of famine relief assistance and food-for-work projects distributed in Borana since 1973, which brought significant benefits to the Borana pastoralists. Although this famine relief more often than not was procured and distributed by international NGO's working in Borana, the government functionaries were eager to present this as government generosity to the Borana.
There were some protests and it is very difficult to see these land losses as voluntary contributions by the community to the development of Borana. But there were public consultations (even if these were often simply announcements of the government's intentions) and the land withdrawn from public access was intended for public benefit.
Perhaps most importantly, the confiscation of land and resources rarely involved crucially important water sources. Access to water and rights to water in the permanent wells are the major determinants governing land use in Borana. In most of the dry-season areas of Borana the amount of land available exceeded the watering capacity of the permanent wells. The Borana could therefore afford to give up some land, as long as the watering capacity in the wells remained constant. There were some attempts by the peasant/pastoral associations to take over management of the wells but this was soon abandoned. The Borana wells remained under Borana management, according to the resource tenure rules evolved by the Borana themselves.
Kin groups or other social formations in Borana did not attempt to claim exclusive rights to particular tracts of land within the larger area under Borana control. Ownership to water sources, however, is much more clearly defined. The main principle for establishing ownership rights to water is by investing labour in the source, either through excavation, re-excavation or maintenance. Man-made stock ponds, as well as deep wells, were therefore known as belonging to specific clans, with a specific relationship known as konfi1 obtaining between the living representatives of a specific lineage within the clan and the well itself. Konfi rights do not involve exclusive rights of use and access, but are rather expressed as a loosely defined responsibility for the well. Ritual responsibilities are probably a more important aspect of konfi rights than the practical management of the well, which will be collectively undertaken by the users of the well, under the supervision of elected officers and in accordance with Borana traditions (ada-seera Borana).
To sum up: As far as land tenure issues are concerned, the relationship of the Borana to the Ethiopian state has implied the following:
· the Ethiopian state assumed (and has maintained) suzerainty over all land in Borana, but has granted user rights to the Borana pastoralists. Government rights have pre-eminence over local user rights. Some land has been withdrawn from regular pastoral land use by the government for various public purposes.
· the Ethiopian state has assumed responsibility for security and for the maintenance of borders with other ethnic groups. The government has been moderately successful in upholding the status quo with regard to the distribution of grazing lands between the various competing ethnic groups in the region. Persistent pressures from Somali groups along the eastern border of Borana-land and since 1991, adept political dealing in a confused political situation, has resulted in the formal recognition of Somali claims to areas which, historically, were controlled by the Borana.
Considerable Borana areas have thus been removed from access and use through the interventions of the Ethiopian state, even if the implicit alliance between the Borana and the Ethiopian state overall probably has been beneficial, particularly as a means of checking the Somali expansion.
The land losses which the Borana as a group have suffered at the level of the larger territorial unit have attracted most attention (see e.g. Yacob Arsano, 1997). These losses have on the one hand come about as the result of macro-political competition and a subsequent change of inter-ethnic borders, but there are also processes at play within Borana which have removed not insignificant tracts of land from Borana land use. For the sake of convenience these may all be called `development-related', since they come about as the direct result of development interventions. Finally, land and pasture is being removed from the Borana pastoral system through various processes which may be seen as secondary or unintended consequences of events relating to the integration of Borana into Ethiopia, including development projects.
The most serious threat to Borana pastures today seems to come from the ecological processes summed up as bush encroachment. One estimate (Coppock, 1994) indicates that as much as 40 % of the remaining pastures in Borana is invaded by bush. Bush encroachment is thus in the process of severely reducing range productivity and the amount of fodder produced for livestock production. Bush encroachment will remove significant amounts of land from the pastoral ecology of the Borana, unless countermeasures are found. Finding such countermeasures seems to be difficult, partly because of the scale of the problem and partly because there seem to be few economically feasible technical solutions available at present to combat this threat. Furthermore, there still seem to be disagreements on how to explain the bush encroachment which in fact is occurring (see e.g. Gufu Oba, 1998). Some explanations relate the increasing bush encroachment to a ban on range burning (which used to be commonly practised) introduced by the Ethiopian administration as a development intervention some decades ago. Other explanations emphasise the increasing livestock densities on the Borana pastures in the same period, caused by improved veterinary services, widespread water development and the regular provision of famine relief. Areas which previously were accessible only in the wet season have become available for use throughout the year because of development projects which have dug stock ponds and re-excavated collapsed wells. More recently, cement-lined water tanks have become a feature of the Borana rangelands. The former distinction between dry-season and wet-season pastures has therefore more or less disappeared. One result of this is the removal of so much forage that there is no dry matter left on the ground to fuel fires, even if regular fire regimes were reintroduced.
Another development-driven process with an impact on land use in Borana is the expansion of farming into the rangelands. Although the soldier-settlers introduced farming into Borana a long time ago, they at the same time occupied the most favourable lands where regular farming was possible. But under the dual impetus of various development projects introducing dryland farming techniques and quick-maturing varieties of maize and sorghum and drought-induced losses in the livestock sector (which may have become more vulnerable to drought because of herd growth and overgrazing) many Borana have taken up high-risk farming in the most favourable parts of the remaining rangelands. This primarily involves simple farming, with minimum effort, on impeded drainages and rich bottom-lands. These plots of land may not involve very extensive areas, but the spread of farming removes patches of rich and strategically important vegetation from pastoral land use. This change in land use is protected by existing legislation, under which the payment of an agricultural tax for plots even in the pastoral areas provides legal user rights for the growing season and protection against encroachment from competitors, including pastoralists. These agricultural plots may thus be fenced off, even if the agricultural operation itself is not successful, thus removing land from common access.
Agriculture is spreading in the wetter parts of the rangelands, apparently as a means of economic diversification. The scale of this expansion is not known, but it seems reasonable to assume that it will limit itself, as the amount of land with an agricultural potential is limited. But the amount of land which is fenced off is considerably larger than the land put to alternative use. Withdrawal of land from common access by fencing it off and claiming exclusive rights to becoming increasingly common.
The introduction of cement-lined water tanks in the Borana rangelands has stimulated private investment in water development by rich herd-owners. Security of tenure becomes important in such investment projects. The protection of the water catchment area feeding the tank is also important. Both considerations encourage fencing. Fencing is becoming increasingly acceptable to the local communities, in particular to protect investments such as houses, prepared agricultural plots, water ponds and water tanks, although fencing as such does not, strictly speaking, change tenure rights, according to the applicable national legislation.
Fencing off enclosures to reserve forage resources for particular purposes is also becoming increasingly common. One of the few exceptions to the free access to pasture which all Borana enjoyed were the occasional patches of good forage in the vicinity of Borana hamlets which the inhabitants set aside as a pasture for calves. In former times, it seems, inhabitants could count on their exclusive rights to these calf patches being respected as part of the `ada-seera Borana' and being upheld by Borana conflict-solving mechanisms. These days, however, the calf patches have to be physically enclosed by thorn-bush fences. Such enclosures have become very popular, and yet other parts of the free ranges of Borana are being removed from common access. Again, the extent of these practices is not known, and depending on the details of who is involved, the enclosures may be seen either as attempts by individuals to appropriate common resources, or as attempts by village communities to put resources in the vicinity under some kind of management. This may be a positive development, which may contribute to better land management and increasing production, particularly for those who have the foresight to go out and enclose pastureland. But there is a risk in this process that increasingly large parts of the Borana population may be excluded from the resources they need for their survival and lose the land rights the currently hold.
Finally, the most recent development in Borana is the alienation of Borana pastures for purposes which do not seem to benefit the Borana themselves. Over the past year or so the Oromiya Regional State has tried to attract and encourage private investment in various commercial ventures which hopefully will contribute to economic growth and increased welfare of the Borana. The full effects of these initiatives have not shown themselves, but at this early stage, the first moves have involved local businessmen fencing off and claiming exclusive rights to quite large tracts of land. The Oromiya Regional State is charged with owning/controlling land on behalf of its citizens, but beyond the wide mandate granted by the Constitution, the subsidiary legislation governing the alienation of land to individuals has not yet been promulgated. The detachment of individual land rights (for the `investors') from the common users rights of the Borana therefore seems to involve actions at two levels: Investors have to seek local support/permission from peasant association leaders to fence off land, and on the strength of this, seek official sanction from the Regional State. So far, only a few `commercial plots' have actually been demarcated (but their legal status is in serious doubt and is being challenged by local leaders1) but investment has not yet taken place. The nature of the commercial venture proposed by these local `investors' is also unclear and because the whole process of land alienation seems to be hidden from public insight, rumours are rife. There are a number of commercial ventures which could be beneficial to the Borana as a whole, and for which quite legitimate request for land could be made (e.g. increased commercialisation and marketing of Borana livestock will need land for sales yards, holding grounds, feed lots, fattening lots, livestock trekking routes etc.). Public development projects have appropriated land in Borana for such purposes before (and failed) and in principle there is no reason why private interests could not try again. But the land issue is so contentious, even in these pastoral contexts, that they must be brought out in public discussion and be resolved in ways which are seen as legitimate according to local precepts.
Pastoral land rights play little part in the public debate on land tenure issues in Ethiopia. There are some good reasons for this. Pastoral land tenure is far less complex and far less contentious than the tenurial arrangements in the agricultural sector. Due to the erratic and random distribution of natural resources in the pastoral areas of Ethiopia, the main issue, as far as pastoral producers are concerned, is secure access within large land units, to allow the pastoralists the flexibility they need to live in these marginal lands. The Ethiopian state has only to a minimal extent taken the particular requirements of pastoralists into consideration in its land tenure legislation. Pastoral land rights are unclear group user rights to such lands as the state sees fit to grant the pastoral groups. The state has never, however, attempted to define, grant or regulate the land rights of individual pastoralists within the ethnic group or within the larger land units to which they have common access.
The rights of the state have pre-eminence over group rights and the problem which seems to emerge now in e.g. Borana, is that the state seems to exercise these rights to the detriment of the Borana both as a group and individually. The eastern border with the Somali Regional State has been changed without any consideration to Borana user rights, and land grants for a variety of different purposes, including government and non-government development projects as well as commercial ventures, are being allocated without Borana user rights being considered or Borana objections being heard.
In parallel to these political processes which imply decaying land rights for Borana pastoralists, probably far more land is being removed from the Borana pastoral ecology through other processes. These do not primarily arise from the relations between the Borana and the state, or at least only indirectly so. Bush encroachment has been mentioned as probably the most imminent and widespread threat to pastoral production in Borana, but the expansion of agriculture into the rangelands and the on-going enclosure of the richest parts of the remaining pastures for the exclusive benefit of individuals or smaller groups of people also pose significant problems.
The Borana have been able to maintain a viable and robust pastoral economy in Southern Ethiopia for several centuries. After their military defeat and incorporation into the Ethiopian state at the turn of this century, there seem to have been few changes to the internal organisation of the Borana. Land use patterns were upheld more or less as they were prior to the conquest, and the social institutions underpinning this adaptation were maintained more or less intact. I have argued elsewhere (cf. Helland, 1998) that the major threat to Borana livelihoods does not necessarily stem from shrinking pastures and reduced productivity, but from the incapacitation of important Borana social institutions. The authority of the ada-seera Borana is eroded and pan-Borana solidarity is being worn down. The Borana have seen their sons removed from political and administrative positions in the local administration and seem to have minimal influence over the events which today shape the welfare and destiny of the Borana.
Access to land may be less of an issue for pastoralists than it is for farmers, but land is still critically important to the pastoral enterprise. Without secure access to land, pastoralists cannot survive. The Borana of Southern Ethiopia seem to be caught between a political process which has resulted in severe shrinkages of the area available to them, and ecological processes which reduce the overall productivity of the remaining rangelands. In both cases the result is increasing population densities (of both people and livestock) in an area and in an adaptation which demands low population densities. Therefore, the Borana as a group can ill afford to give up more land, or lose more land to investors and other individuals who are eager to secure individual rights to common benefits. For the foreseeable future, the Borana must live off their land. The various ongoing processes of land alienation which have been discussed here do not bode well for the future of the main economic activity of pastoralism in Borana.
I gratefully acknowledge comments from the workshop discussions and from Dr. Yeraswork Admassie, Addis Ababa University.
Originally presented at a workshop on Human Adaptation in African Drylands, organised in Khartoum, 7 - 11 December, 1998, by OSSREA / University of Bergen.
2 The conventional definition of who is a pastoralist (those who derive 50% or more of their annual income from livestock and livestock products) is used here.
3 Good examples are the groups owning `group ranches' in Kenya, or the `peasant (pastoral) associations' created in Ethiopia in the wake of the 1975 Land Reform.
4 This is obviously a very brief overview of a vastly more complex situation.
5 The Borana are one of the many Oromo groups of Ethiopia. They inhabit parts of Southern Ethiopia and Northern Kenya.
6 The taxes and corvee labour paid by the Borana were moderate compared to the resources extracted from sharecropping peasants further north.
7 The Kallu is a religious/ritual leader. There are two main Kallus, from the two moieties into which Borana is organised, as well as several minor ones.
8 The Gada is an elaborate generation-grading system found in many Oromo societies.
9 Contributions were usually voluntary, but in many cases the amount to be contributed was determined by public assemblies, on the basis of clans.
10 These local replacements reflected the national confrontation between the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which opposed the new national government and the Oromo People's Democratic Organisation (OPDO), which has supported it.
11 The term konfi also refers to the digging stick which the previously non-agricultural Borana used only to dig graves, wells and stock ponds.
12 Gufu Oba cites one on-going case where a letter of protest was signed by 127 local elders (Gufu Oba, 1998:68).
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