The Director General of Rwanda Natural Resources Authority (RNRA), Emmanuel Nkurunziza, has said they are planning to remove or reduce land transfer fees which continue to be a burden to Rwandan citizens.The New Times’ Frank Kanyesigye caught up with Nkurunziza who explained about the formal ownership of land in the country and his institution’s achievements and challenges.Below are the  extracts: Q: Land registration was completed, why the initiative to kick off this programme?

A: The land registration was based on the national land policy which was put in place in 2004. It was established after analysing the key land issues in the country and one of the things that were identified was lack of tenure security.

It was vital to establish formal registration of land so that people can have legal rights on the land they hold. It was also identified that there was little investment on the land due to the fact that people didn’t have legal titles.

Rwandans were not sure if they are going to own the land for the next couple of days, years and using land as an economic asset, for instance, as collateral to acquire loans from financial institutions and banks. It wasn’t possible at all. All these factors informed the design of the land registration programme, it was made part of our law and that is how we begun implementing it.Q: Are the people contented with the land registration programme?

A:  Yes, I would think so, because the indications we had, most people who participated in the programme are already reaping benefits from this process. Besides land registration, we also carry out monitoring and impact evaluation. According to the preliminary results from the impact evaluation being undertaken by the World Bank, people are very much contented with the programme. Even though we expect much bigger impact after some time, even right now people are satisfied. Q: What major challenges were encountered during registration?

A: Well, we were more or less pioneering this mass undertaking not only in Rwanda but globally, so the challenges of running a programme of this nature were immense having to design every process, from scratch. So we had to look at different ways of innovation to achieve the results we wanted at minimal cost. The resources were limited but we tried to be creative. But again the understanding of our people and also dealing with our historical issues also hampered the process.

Within land ownership, there are all sorts of issues that have come from our history; issues of land ownership in the 50’s and genocide, among others, have all left challenges that were manifested in the way land was held.

Then issues of family relations like polygamy in some areas were the major challenges we encountered. So all these came up during the land registration process and we had to look for ways of resolving them with the help of other government organs. Q: You registered 10.3 million parcels all over the country; does that mean that Rwanda is made up of those parcels only?

A: Yes, we have covered from border to border. With confidence, I can tell you that those are the number of parcels we have in the country. Of course it doesn’t mean that it’s a static figure, people subdivide, merge and they might even increase and decrease but as of now those are the parcels registered.Q: What are the formal procedures of land transfer?

A: Actually this is the next stage of awareness and communication that we need to explain to people. After getting a land title, how can you transact if somebody buys your land, how can it be transferred from the original holder to the new one, this is provided for by the law. Once you have the land title you can transact the land in any way you want, if you want to give your land for free or you want to sell it, it’s up to you. What you need to do is to go and sign a transfer agreement at the office of the land notary who is the district land officer; there is a form which you fill with witnesses. Basing on that form, we can be able to change ownership from one person to another.

At the moment, we are trying to see how in future we can move the services nearer to the people because I think the district is a bit distant from some sectors and cells. The law provides that the district land officer is the only one who can act as notary to land, so all people need to do is to go sign a land transfer agreement,  attach original documents and they bring them here and we effect the transfer.Q: How have you managed to resolve the issue of property taxes and land lease in the country?

A: Here, let me make one important distinction of land taxes and lease fee which is very cropped up in terms of mixing lease fees with land taxes. Basically, what we have in Rwanda is generally a lease hold system where government is leasing land to holders and we call them fees. For the majority of Rwandans, this does not concern them because in rural areas, for land under two hectares you don’t pay any money in terms of lease fees. In urban areas there are fees that have been indicated depending on the size of the land, the use and where it’s located.Land taxes or property taxes apply where you have property (a developed house). Once you have a lease, for example, a residential plot and you build a house on it, what we expect is for you to apply for a free hold title so that you stop paying lease fees, and pay property taxes.

There is a law which specifies the property tax you pay which is the percentage of the value of the structure you have. It’s 0.01 percent of the value of the house you have on land. You only pay lease fees when you still own land, once you develop a building on that land, according to the plans provided by the district, you immediately request for a free hold and then you can start paying a property tax.Q: Why do some people pay taxes and others don’t?

A: Well, as I said earlier,  in rural areas if you have agricultural land and it’s under two hectares, you don’t pay any lease fees, in urban areas all land users pay lease fees apart from agricultural land but when it comes to tax, everybody who has a developed structure pays a property tax. Once you have a free hold title, meaning that you have finished developing your plot and you have a developed structure, then the district can come and value so that you start paying a percentage value of that property annually as a tax.

For a property tax there is no exemption as long as you have a developed structure in a planned area and the district has been able to value it. But for the lease fees, there are categories that are exempted from paying, like forestry and residentials in rural areas. There is a ministerial order which specifies what fees are paid by what uses, in which area and what uses are exempted. This was based on the fact that if you have two hectares what you get out of there is not too much and the government interest is not really taxes, it’s to help the local people but if you have a big land and you expect to earn more then you should be able to pay lease fees.

We don’t tax land; there is tax on property, house, industry and commercial buildings, what we have on bare land is lease fees, you pay on an annual basis and they are based on the size of the land you own, location and the use. I think in Kigali, a residential in good neighbourhoods, people pay Rwf 80 per square metre, so if you have a standard plot of 500 square metres that means you will pay Rwf 40,000 on annual basis. That is when you have not developed a house on that plot.Q: What are the proper procedures of land inheritance?

A:  Land inheritance is covered by the succession law which was put in place in 1999 and it stipulates how inheritance is done. It can be done by either a will or court order. Courts can decide how the successors will share the property but there is also a provision that a family meeting coordinated by the president of the lower court can also sit and determine how the property should be shared.

There are provisions on who has the rights to inherit but it normally goes through those channels. On our part, if they tell us that the owner is deceased and did not leave a will or any agreement behind on how the property will be shared, we write that land as succession to that person until the responsible authority tells us how the family will share the properties.The main channel to determine land inheritance is court but, it would be better if people were able to write wills in advance which would solve a lot of problems.Q: Have you faced any challenge of land inheritance?

A: We do encounter them a lot and its one of the major challenges because sending people to court to get these decisions it’s not easy, you know our court system is jammed with lots of cases so when people go there to get the decisions, it takes a long time. Our people do not write wills so they normally come and tell us that we are the children of so and so and we need a share of the properties.

As an institution, we cannot be sure if there are any other children or not because our experience in land registration is that every time we go to register land in a certain area, children whom people didn’t know would turn up and there is no way we can prove. We say okay and write them down and the definitive judgement can be done by court.

There are many issues in this area, we need to work out and see how we can promote the issues of people on how to write wills and find basically another institution that can back up courts in making these destinations.Q: When a couple dies with no children, then who is legible to inherit the properties?

A: The succession law provides for that and the next beneficiaries are the parents of the deceased if they are there. The law explains different levels of relatives who succeed if the group is not there, like who comes next in line depending on who is available and not. The one important thing to note is that girls and boys have the same rights to inherit according to the succession law of 1999. Q: Are the procedures of making land transfers on urban land similar to those applied in rural areas?

A: Absolutely they are the same but there are certain things we would like to see changed, as I said besides signing transfer forms which we have standardised across the country, there is a fee you pay, notarisation fee, which is Rwf 20,000. We are trying to see this fee removed or reduced because for any plot of land you are transferring you need to pay Rwf 20,000 and we find this a burden especially in rural areas where you find somebody is selling a small piece of land at Rwf 50,000 and out of that amount they are required to pay Rwf 20,000.

We are working out a model where we can exempt some people from this fee or reduce to make it sure it commensurate to the value of the property that has been transacted.Q: Land registration is over, what is the way forward?

A: This is the first registration if I may call it, but people are going to continue transacting land. Today, in Kigali, I can assure you that the people we have registered on land, many of them have transferred, sold and subdivided it, that process continues. Our responsibility is to make sure that the electronic land register we have resembles what is on the ground, if a change happens somewhere we must have the means and the capacity to ensure that our register reflects it.

Our preoccupation now is to make sure that we put in place systems and processes that will make it possible. It’s not easy at all, we have to make sure people are able to register their transactions as easily as possible, that is why I was telling you that we are thinking of removing transfer fees, moving notaries to sectors and reducing processes. Our challenge is to make sure that we continuously make it possible for people to register whatever changes happen. If somebody dies, successors should be the new people, it shouldn’t stay like that, we should be able to capture that and make sure that our register is updated.Q: Can you explain the rights of people who have land in the village (Imidugudu)?

A: By the way, this is a big issue that has really bothered us but it’s going to be resolved. The organic land law of 2005 categorise land in the villages as public district land, which means the government would be able to find sites where people can build in the villages. But what happened, later people had to find where to buy their own land in the villages, do exchanges. The law provided something which was contrary to what was on the ground so our challenge was we can’t do anything which is contrary to the law.

We explained to the people in the villages to bear with us as we are in the process of amending the law, what we will do is to demarcate your land for now, record it as a state land but put your name as a beneficiary, so that once the law is amended then we can straight away put you as the owner and issue you with a title. We tried to explain that and if you can remember, recently, the cabinet approved the amendment of the land law but it has to go through parliament. 

Until that comes, we still tell people to be patient and not to break the law which is still varied even though we are trying to get the amended version to rectify your problem. We tried to explain to the affected people as much as possible regarding that issue.Q:  Any other comment would you wish to make?

A: I have two comments; the first one is to inform Rwandans who have got the titles, that contrary to what they had in the past, now they have legal ownership of land and this means that if there is any change in that ownership, it must be registered. If you buy land from somebody and you don’t get it registered, please, that property is not yours. We would encourage people to formalise their transactions as quickly as possible.

Secondly with regard to the areas where we are issuing these titles, the turn up  to collect them has been relatively low apart from the Eastern Province, other provinces the collection is very low. We send our staff to issue them but people don’t collect them, when we leave the field we take the titles to districts where they will collect them at their own free time and which is time consuming.

We spend a whole month in every cell issuing land titles but owners don’t turn up to collect them. We encourage the local authorities to mobilise people to collect their titles.We thank our partners who have facilitated us in the whole process.