Zimbabwe has spent a generation asking legal questions in an endeavour to settle questions that the legal fraternity can only partially answer.
As much as counsel can draft an offer letter, a permit, a ninety-nine-year lease or a deed, and counsel can litigate boundaries, and interpret sections, like 289, 293 and 295 of the Zimbabwe Constitution, counsel cannot do, and certainly will not know all land factors, like production, spirituality, sacred relation, a customary inheritance, a national memory, or as an integral part of biological ecosystems.
This then calls for the land question to be handled not as a file for lawyers alone, but as a shared problem for economists, planners, surveyors, financiers, soil scientists, customary authorities and project designers, and many others, so as to map, price, finance and live with the same plot - pun intended.
So, necessarily, land refuses a single category. It is all simultaneously a commodity, a memory, a legal construct, a living system and, for many others, a sacred presence. People do not merely use it differently; they 'inhabit' different accounts of what it is.
To the economist, land is a factor of production: scarce, site-specific, and a source of rent. Differential rent, location theory and hedonic pricing treat its value as derived from what can be grown or built. “Highest and best use” is a technical phrase, not a moral one.
To many spiritual and customary traditions, land is itself a relative, and thus given the same relational interaction, not an input! Land, being a "place", carries agency, history and obligation. Burial grounds and sacred sites are not undeveloped parcels; they are relationships that outlast a deed.
Culture and norms bestows unto land inheritance rules, gender regimes and communal tenure, with national myths fusing people and "their" soil inexorably. So legally based constructs around land, which do not consider these other factors, risk displacements that rupture a people, who they are instrinsically, their story, as well as how their make their income and livelihoods.
This is because in law, land is only but just a bundle of rights that can be sliced - surface, minerals, water, air, development, conservation - so that one part of these disaggregated sections of one plot of land may be owned by one party, the next part occupied by another, and yet the third part regulated by yet another. Property regimes are political settlements presented as fact.
Nothing can be further from what land is, particularly to us Africans.
Zimbabwe’s present governance system is the accumulated expression of that collision. The political settlement of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme is treated as closed and irreversible. However, the administrative conversion of that settlement into usable capital is not.
Agricultural resettlement still sits on several instruments at once. Roughly 360,000 A1 households hold permits or offer letters; some 23,500 A2 farmers hold or are exiting 99-year leases; about 70,000 households on older resettlement schemes are being drawn into the same regularisation.
Then there's the Presidential Title Deeds Programme, coordinated by the Land Tenure Implementation Committee, which is surveying farms and issuing registrable titles transferable among indigenous Zimbabweans. By late August 2026 some 27,000 farms had been surveyed and just over 1,400 deeds registered, unlocking about United States dollars 110 million through discounted sales and mortgages.
Beneficiaries receive a 60% to 70% discount, and twenty-year mortgages at 7.5%. Meanwhile officials describe the shift as moving from the question of who holds the land to the question of what can be done with it. Be that as it may, the older papers have not been abolished. They coexist with the new deeds, which is why litigation has not receded.
Key also to the Zimbabwe land question is that compensation for improvements - not the land itself - to former commercial farmers continues under the 2020 Global Compensation Deed, with an initial cash payment of United States dollars 3.1 million to 378 farms and the balance in dollar bonds. Sixty-seven farms protected by Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements are also being returned as a treaty obligation. Then there's some 840 farms said to have been acquired in error which are are being restored to Black Zimbabwean owners.
By placing around US$3.5 billion in compensation to former commercial farmers on the publicly guaranteed national debt and completing the land's transfer into the national estate this way it means the state has given every taxpayer a claim on the very same land because we have all "paid", or are obligated to do so, via our taxes: what traditionalists and historians among us will say was the status quo anyway pre colonisation.
How then can we bring equity with deeds about an asset everyone feels they collectively hold a deed to? This is the conundrum Zimbabwe is solving, albeit piecemeal.
Looking at land from an economics and finance perspective presents a three-factor front of aggregate output being generated by combining technology, labour, reproducible capital and land itself, as a means to sustain livelihoods and growth.
So in this case, land becomes a spatially fixed, non-reproducible and heterogeneous critical ingredient to value and wealth creation, all which runs very much counter to the legal view expounded above, of land being non-heterogeneous and very much divisible to its constituent parts where one may own some and not other of its parts. Those being the air above it, surface on top, minerals underneath, water within and without, development, conservation and many other facets.
All this demonstrates the indispensable need for a multi-disciplinary approach that reconciles all these almost competing aspects, such that at least the final established land policy somewhat ensures there is harmony amid contrasting values and competition.
Thus, from an economics and finance angle, a land policy that is very congruent when scrutinised legally only, may still prohibitively raise user cost of capital, and tighten collateral constraints of the Kiyotaki-Moore type, while lowering the steady-state capital-output ratio.
This is exactly where Zimbabwe is, as Finance Minister Prof. Mthuli Ncube has had to put a number on the idle stock: agricultural land valued at about US 6 cents per square metre, with secure tenure said to be capable of bringing up to US$20 billion into measured national product. The title programme referenced earlier, being led by the Land Tenure Implementation Committee, is an attempt to move that stock from just "legal" occupation, and into accommodating the financial system, as banks remain cautious since the instruments are still not suitable as debt collateral.
The same residual claim that frustrates debt acquisition can, however, still be used as equity. Where the state retains legal title while assigning use and income rights, it can contribute land as an unencumbered, non-cash residual claim. Zimbabwe’s Policy Framework for Government Shareholding and Equity in Public-Private Partnerships, refined in the 2026 Public-Private Partnership guidelines, allows the Contracting Authority to place state land, a mining claim, or a park asset into a Special Purpose Vehicle as equity-in-kind to partner an investor in a national project.
This very fact, that rubs the legal fraternity expectation of land being just a bundle of rights (that can be sliced), is also the driving spur behind many recent partnerships for national projects. The Government of Zimbabwe takes advantage of state land, which it controls, to vest it as co-investment with private capital (cash). This has stimulated the recent proliferation of a plethora of infrastructural projects the country has witnessed being implemented lately.
Infrastructure and concession vehicles are being designed around a minimum government shareholding of 30 percent, with an option to increase, while commercial vehicles and greenfield mining joint ventures have used a 26 percent free-carry through the Mining Promotion Corporation. The private party comes into the project and supplies funding, construction capacity, and operating risk, while the government supplies land as equity. No contemporaneous foreign-exchange outlay is required for the public share. This is but just one classic case in point why the land question must not be confined to the domain of law only.
Still in economics, in Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) and Build-Own-Operate-Transfer (BOOT) structures, cash-flow rights rest with the concessionaire for a defined horizon; at expiry or negotiated buy-out, the operating asset reverts because the land never left the state’s legal estate. Reversion at the end of the tenure is cheaper to enforce when the sovereign already holds residual custody of the land, than it would be under atomised freehold that would have to be assembled parcel by parcel.
With all this in mind, therefore, the next decade will not be won by another round of legal instruments alone. It will be won if surveyors, soil scientists, planners, customary authorities, project-finance lawyers, bankers and macroeconomists are required to sit in the same room as the conveyancer, lawyers and advocates and accommodate all aspects of what "land" is.
The country’s land is already allocated. The scarce resource now needs a system that can carry that allocation into investment, infrastructure and intergenerational transfer without pretending that a deed is the whole of the thing it describes.
As eminent Peruvian economist and author Hernando de Soto said, “Because the rights to (land) possessions are not adequately documented, assets cannot readily be turned into capital, and cannot be traded outside of narrow, local circles where people know and trust each other, therefore cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment.”