By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)

August 2026

The Ministry of Lands commissioned a review of the land laws of The Gambia: The Legal Review of Land Tenure and Land Administration Laws in The Gambia, assigned under the World Bank funded GIRAV project. The consultancy read Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda, and three other countries besides, and left the land it was sent to study unopened. This is the second essay on that review.

The preceding essay: ‘The Question the Land Review Assumed Away’ settled the prior question: the state does not own this land. Outside the former Colony it never did, and no statute since has manufactured what the colonial administration never held. The land is the kabilolu‘s, held by first right, from before the state that now renames it. That ground is settled, and this essay builds on it.

The reform half admits as much. Its roadmap proposes to amend the Constitution by ‘recognising customary tenure’. To recognise a ‘tenure’ concedes a holding and stops short of the ownership the state never had, and ‘customary’ is the coloniser‘s name for what he declined to protect.

Once the reform grants that the land needs a form in law, it must look somewhere to find one. It looks outward. It looks to Accra, to Nairobi, to Kigali.

The Reform Looks Abroad

The review sets aside a whole phase for the search. It lines up six jurisdictions, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa and the United Kingdom, and says without embarrassment what they are for. Each ‘provides specific legislative provisions that the Reform Roadmap can adapt’. The review would build the reform from foreign parts.

The recommendations bear it out line by line. Spousal consent arrives ‘modelled on section 47 of Ghana‘s Land Act 2020’. A land tribunal comes ‘modelled on the Kenyan Environment and Land Court Act 2011’. Tenancy reform follows ‘on the model of’ the United Kingdom‘s Renters‘ Rights Act. Registration is ‘modelled on the Rwandan’ programme. Five borrowings, one habit.

None of this is scandalous on its own. Reviews borrow. A tribunal design travels well, and a survey method crosses a border carrying no politics. A court can be built anywhere and belong to no one. The form of a people‘s land cannot be imported, because it is a people‘s relation to their own ground, and Ghana‘s relation is Ghana‘s, not The Gambia‘s. For the form of the indigenous holding, the very thing the Ministry hired the consultancy to study, it goes abroad, and searches every capital except the kabilo in front of it.

Comparative law has studied this reflex and given it a name. Alan Watson called it a legal transplant: a rule lifted from one jurisdiction and set down in another. The field has studied the practice for half a century and found its limits. Pierre Legrand argued that a transplanted rule loses its meaning at the border, because meaning lives in the legal culture that made it. Berkowitz, Pistor and Richard tested forty-nine countries and found that unadapted transplants produce weaker legal systems, roughly a third less effective, a measurable cost they named the transplant effect. The review proceeds without any of this. It transplants at three depths, in its words, its categories and its institutions, and the sections that follow trace each to the ground it cannot hold.

The Model That Refused to Copy

The review is proudest of Ghana. It calls Ghana ‘the most directly comparable model’ and means to proceed ‘by transposing the parts of the Ghanaian model that have demonstrably worked’. What Ghana did with its own land does not agree with the proposal.

Ghana did not copy England. Its Constitution takes stool land and vests it in the stool, held ‘in trust for the subjects of the stool’. It then forbids anyone to carve a freehold out of that land at all. Where the 1880 statute pressed the ‘estate’ onto this coast, Ghana‘s founders refused it and kept the stool.

The review‘s model is the country that declined to be a copier. Ghana built from its own institution and shut the door the review wants open. The review records the fact and misreads it. Its transposition table enters Ghana‘s Article 267 as a constitutional trust over communal land, and sets against the Gambian column only ‘general property protection’ under section 22. It found the gap. It proposed to fill the gap with an import.

The lesson is not Ghana‘s statute. It is Ghana‘s method. A West African state under the same received common law can lift its own institution into the Constitution and bar the ‘estate’ over it. The Gambia holds such an institution, and it already owns the land. It is the kabilo. Read it, and there is nothing to transpose. The kabilo carries no constitutional form yet, and the gap is real. It is an argument for giving the kabilo that form, as Ghana gave the stool its Article 267, and not for dressing it in Ghana‘s.

Translated a Second Time

The constitutional lesson is Ghana‘s. The statutory trap is what comes next. The review‘s own description of the kabilo is honest, and the honesty convicts the rest. In its descriptive pages it draws the kabilo well. The ‘allodial and customary-freehold interests’, it writes, ‘vest in the Kabilo’, and a household‘s use of a plot ‘reverts to the clan if the household line ended’. That is close to true. A holding that belongs to the lineage and returns to it, never to a market.

In the recommendations the same author takes the holding apart. He would build the Gambian system ‘on the Ghanaian model’ and cut the land into interests, ‘each registrable on its own terms’. Ghana‘s Land Act sorts land into six of them: ‘allodial title, common law freehold, customary law freehold, usufructuary interest, leasehold interest, and customary tenancy’. The review would lay that grid over the kabilo.

The two pages will not sit together. The man who described the kabilo whole would register it in pieces. His own vocabulary gives him away. The word ‘customary-freehold’ has already entered the description, the grid arriving before the recommendation turns it into a plan.

This is a second translation. ‘The Question the Land Review Assumed Away’ traced the first to 1880, when the Land (Registration of Deeds) Act defined land as ‘any estate or interest whatever in real property’. To codify the kabilo into Ghana‘s interests runs that machine again, one remove on, the ‘estate’ arriving now from Accra rather than London.

Legrand‘s point lands here with its full weight, on one category above the rest. Ghana‘s ‘customary tenancy’ carries a meaning inside Ghanaian land relations. Laid on the kabilo it arrives empty, and what fills the vacancy is a landlord relation the kabilo never held. The host becomes a rent-taker on his own ground.

None of this is hypothetical, and it has an address. The Brufut Manneh and Sanneh clans held about 37 hectares of communal farmland at Kajabang, worked and inherited across generations. In 2002, under the Jammeh dictatorship, the State took the land and transferred it to Taf Holdings. The Manneh clan, who held 32 of those hectares, refused to accept the 250,000 dalasi the State put on the table as compensation.

The land became Brufut Gardens and the AU Presidential Villas, worth twelve to fifteen million US dollars today. The Manneh clan went to court in 2003, as Civil Suit 44/03, and no final judgment has come in over two decades. The villas went up regardless.

That is the grid at work before the law has even codified it. The kabilolu‘s inheritance became lots, and the lots were sold. Across one stretch of Brufut, 2,775 plots of 400 square metres stand where one communal holding stood for centuries. The review would write that conversion into national law, interest by registrable interest, until it turns every kabilo the same way.

A Machine and Its Destination

The Rwandan borrowing turns on the reform itself. The review calls for ‘phased customary registration modelled on the Rwandan Land Tenure Regularisation programme’, and lists the attractions: ‘community-based demarcation, low-cost survey, integrated digital cadastre’.

Between 2009 and 2013 Rwanda registered its whole territory, some 10.3 million parcels, one at a time, compulsory, at roughly six US dollars each, and set out to issue a registered title to every holder. When it finished, the country was a single cadastre of individual parcels. That is a tenure remade.

The State Lands Act already names the wrong the review would automate. It deems the indigenous holders of designated areas into ‘ninety-nine-year lessees of the state’, and the deeper wrong lies further back, when the state claimed the right to turn ancestral land into property at all. The Rwandan machine makes that exact turn, communal ground into titled parcel, and the review would import it whole.

Someone will answer that the review took only the method, the cheap survey and the community mapping, and not the Rwandan model of ownership. It will not hold. The machine carries its destination wired inside it, a country of individually titled plots, and it drives there whatever the label on the box. ‘Customary registration’ is a name for individualisation dressed as the name of its opposite.

Berkowitz, Pistor and Richard measured what happens next. Countries that received foreign law without adapting it to local conditions built weaker legal systems than countries that built from within, and the gap was large enough to measure. They called it the transplant effect. The review proposes an unadapted transplant and names it reform.

The transplant effect measures the institutional cost. The direction of that cost has a Gambian address. ‘Before The State, Part Three: Who Signs for the Community?’ warned that a digitised register only records the same direction. The review‘s ‘integrated digital cadastre’ is that register. Set it on the colonial office that already signs away this land, and you have not turned that office towards the community. You have computerised it facing the wrong way.

The Answer Was Never Abroad

Everything the review crossed borders to find sat behind it the whole time. The kabilo owns the land and holds it as a communal trust, the Saama Kanto, kept across the dead, the living and those not yet born. That is the form the reform says it lacks; older than any statute the review cites.

The seyfo and the alkalo, whose mark sits on every transfer, do not speak for that trust. ‘Who Signs for the Community?’ followed their seat to a colonial office built to answer upward, to the Crown and then the state, and never down to the people below. Put Rwanda‘s register on that seat and it records the same upward answer. The seat is the thing to turn, or to pull out by the root.

To read the kabilo is to do more than fetch a kinder scheme. It is to seat an authority that answers the community it serves, where the colonial office now sits, and to bind the state to Free, Prior and Informed Consent before it lays a hand on the land. ‘Who Signs for the Community?’ asked what should stand in the seat‘s place. The essays still to come will answer it.

A system still needs a record, and a cadastre promises one. Keep a record then, one that holds the kabilo whole, the trust and the custody within it set down together, in place of a grid that files it away in fragments. The choice was never a system against no system. It runs between a system that reads the land and one that translates it out of existence.

The Task Left Undone

Six countries, and not one of them the one on the map. The review read Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa and the United Kingdom to learn the shape of the indigenous holding, and never read the kabilo, which was the whole of its brief.

The reflex is old. The state borrowed the ‘estate’; another country‘s grammar of land, sooner than read its own, and ‘The Question the Land Review Assumed Away’ traced that borrowing to its root. The review now transplants a whole reform the same way, three times over, in its words, its categories and its institutions.

The task was to read the land of The Gambia. The review read six other lands instead. The work it was sent to do stands undone, and the kabilo waits where it has always waited, for the law to learn to read it.

Saama Kanto: the sacred responsibility that predates every statute, every gazette, and every ordinance that ever claimed authority over land our ancestors held before any of them existed. I offer this analysis in that spirit.

A Note on Sources: This is the second essay on the Legal Review of Land Tenure and Land Administration Laws in The Gambia, commissioned under the GIRAV project. The document under discussion is the GIRAV Desk Review Report, prepared by the consultancy led by Prof. Raymond A. Atuguba. All quotations attributed to the review are drawn from it.

The legal-transplants scholarship cited in this essay: Alan Watson, Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law (1974; second edition, University of Georgia Press, 1993); Pierre Legrand, “The Impossibility of Legal Transplants,” Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 4 (1997), pp. 111–124; Daniel Berkowitz, Katharina Pistor and Jean-Francois Richard, “Economic Development, Legality, and the Transplant Effect,” European Economic Review 47 (2003), pp. 165–195.

About the Author: Dave Manneh is the Founder and Research Lead of Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC), a Gambian think tank working on land tenure and land governance. The full research archive is available at https://securing-futures.org/research