ABSTRACT
Introduction Land tenure has been defined as consisting of the social relations and institutions governing access to, and ownership of, land and natural resources, and sometimes as a ‘bundle of rights’ associated with land and property (Simpson 1976; Maxwell and Wiebe 1998). Land titling or land registration is a procedure that serves both public and private functions. Public functions relate to the need for States to maintain records of their land resources for fiscal or other purposes, while private functions are concerned with individual needs to create and transfer rights in land. Security of tenure is simply the state of being safe or secure in the holding of land; it can exist whether or not there is documentary proof of its existence. Under customary tenure in many parts of Africa, for example, the occupant of a piece of land enjoys security of tenure without necessarily having any documentary evidence to prove the fact. For de Soto (2000: 53), formal property also has the effect of creating individuals from masses, by transforming people with property interests into individuals who can be called to account. For de Soto, individualised property systems bring people with interests in property into complex webs of connections that involve both the State and the private sector. The property system, it is said, ‘draws out the abstract potential from buildings and fixes it in representations that allow us to go beyond passively using the buildings only as shelters’ (de Soto 2000: 60). Moreover, formal property systems protect and enforce property transactions, making land easily transferable.
