Customary tenure and compensation eligibility: the recurring failure of title-based valuation

1. The model implicit in a compensation schedule

A standard entitlement matrix assumes that for any parcel there is a holder, that the holder's interest can be described, and that extinguishing it can be compensated by a payment to that person. This model is administratively necessary and empirically inaccurate across much of the region in which it is applied.

Land under customary tenure is frequently held through arrangements that do not resolve to a single holder with an exclusive interest. A parcel may be subject to a lineage claim, an allocation to a household, cultivation rights held by particular household members, seasonal grazing access held by others entirely, and tree tenure held separately from the land beneath. Each is a real interest whose extinguishment is a real loss.

2. Derived and secondary rights

The interests most reliably lost in compensation processes are derived rights: those held not by the primary claimant but by others with recognised access. Tenant cultivators, borrowers of land under reciprocal arrangements, pastoralists with seasonal access, and women cultivating plots allocated within a household holding all fall into this category.

These rights are usually invisible to an enumeration keyed to the person who presents as the owner. The enumerator asks who holds the land; one person answers; the record closes. The tenant who has cultivated it for a decade, and whose entire agricultural income derives from it, does not appear in the register and receives nothing.

This is not a failure to apply the standards. All three major regimes require that economic displacement be compensated irrespective of title, and a tenant losing cultivation income is economically displaced. It is a failure of instrument design: the register had no field in which the tenant could be recorded.

3. Communal and common property

Resources held in common present the sharpest version of the problem. Grazing land, woodland, water points and fishing grounds contribute materially to rural household income and subsistence, and their loss is among the impoverishment risks most reliably realised and least reliably compensated.

The difficulty is partly conceptual — there is no individual holder to pay — and partly procedural, in that identifying the user population requires a different method from parcel enumeration. Compensation for common property loss generally has to be structured as a collective benefit, which raises governance questions about who receives it and on whose behalf, and those questions are answered badly when they are answered late.

4. Documentation asymmetry

A further complication is that the burden of demonstrating a claim falls hardest on those least able to discharge it. Where eligibility depends on evidence of occupation or use, and the standard of evidence is set by people accustomed to documentary proof, holders under customary arrangements are systematically disadvantaged — not because their claims are weaker but because their claims were never written down.

Practice that works tends to accept a wider evidentiary base: neighbour attestation, local leadership confirmation, physical evidence of cultivation, and enumeration records themselves as evidence of occupation at the cut-off date. Practice that fails applies a documentary standard uniformly and records the resulting exclusions as ineligibility rather than as an artefact of method.

5. What a tenure-aware instrument requires

Three design features distinguish an instrument capable of representing customary tenure. The register must permit multiple interest-holders per parcel with differentiated interests, rather than a single owner field. Enumeration must ask about use and access separately from ownership, since the questions have different answers and the second is the one that predicts income loss. And household-level enumeration must be capable of recording intra-household allocation, or the interests of women and junior members will be aggregated into a household head's entitlement and disappear.

None of these is expensive if designed in at the outset. All are effectively impossible to retrofit once enumeration is complete, which is why tenure analysis belongs to instrument design rather than to the analysis of results.