Can the government take your land without paying you?

A government can compel you to give up land for a public purpose. It cannot lawfully do so without compensation. Constitutions across the region guarantee prompt and adequate compensation as a condition of compulsory acquisition, and where a project is financed by a development bank or under the Equator Principles, the standards go further — assistance is owed even to people who hold no legal title at all.

Two separate protections

National law typically requires a public purpose, a formal process of notice and inquiry, and payment before or at the point of possession. It compensates recognised interests: titled owners, and in most of the region holders of customary rights.[4]

Lender standards go beyond that. They require compensation at full replacement cost rather than assessed market value, and they extend assistance to people with no recognisable legal claim — informal occupants, tenants, people farming land they do not own.[1] If a project is financed by the World Bank, IFC, the African Development Bank or a commercial bank applying the Equator Principles, this applies regardless of what national law requires.[2]

What "public purpose" does and does not cover

The power exists for roads, power lines, water schemes, railways and similar public infrastructure. Where land is being acquired for a private development, the position is more constrained and worth questioning — a private company generally has to negotiate, and can only rely on compulsory acquisition where a statute specifically provides for it.

If you are told the state will take the land anyway, that claim is either true and should be evidenced by a formal notice, or it is a negotiating position.

What lawful acquisition looks like

• A formal, published notice identifying the land and the purpose.
• A survey and an inquiry at which claims can be presented.
• An award stating what is payable and on what basis.
• Payment before possession — not an undertaking to pay later.
• A route to object and, if necessary, to go to court.

Where possession is taken without those steps, what has happened is not acquisition; it is eviction, and it is challengeable on that basis.[3]

If you hold no title

This is the most common situation in the region and the most misunderstood. Under national law you may have no claim to the land itself. Under the lender standards you are entitled to compensation for the structures and crops you put there, and to assistance sufficient to restore your livelihood — and to be counted in the census on the same basis as anyone else. Ask which standards apply to the project; the answer changes what you are owed.