Parliament has finally passed a Customary Land Bill after a long heated debate that ensued for two consecutive days as the lawmakers tussled in an attempt to make some amendments to the bill.<\/p>\n
Most members from the opposition benches proposed a removal of a provision in the bill that subjects landowners to a payment of certain charges on their registered land.<\/p>\n
The provision became bone of contention on Wednesday and Thursday as opposition members clashed with government in an attempt to have the provision removed from the bill.<\/p>\n
Chairperson of the joint committee tasked to look into the bills, Werani Chilenga, who is also a lawmaker for Rumphi South, on Wednesday argued that the provision will pose a negative impact on poor people who will not be able to pay the fees thereby hindering them from owning land that they inherited from their forefathers.<\/p>\n
However, the bill resurfaced in the house yesterday at a report stage and Lands Minister, Atupele Muluzi, had a tough time to justify the clause and convince the house that the provision will only be applicable where a transaction of the registered land is involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere will be no any payment for a holder of land title, the clause will be applicable when they decide to sell the land, lend or get a mortgage and any transaction, and these will normally attract certain fees upon processing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After a long debate on the matter, Muluzi seemed to have fought a good fight as the house assented to his justification and passed the bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is historical because it\u2019s been 14 years since we made major strides in regards to land reforms. As a country that is striving for economic diversification, we needed to address issues of land especially in regards to securing title which will empower people economically,\u201d Muluzi said<\/p>\n
This week the house has passed four land related bills including the Land Bill, Physical Planning and Land Survey bills<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Parliament has finally passed a Customary Land Bill after a long heated debate that ensued for two consecutive days as the lawmakers tussled in an attempt to make some amendments to the bill. Most members from the opposition benches proposed a removal of a provision in the bill that subjects landowners to a payment of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28116,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28111\/revisions\/28116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}