KB.L African land news digest

​African Land News Digest
| Q4 2025 |
Published January 2026
This digest synthesizes issues and trends extracted from selected articles curated on the www.knowledgebase.land website in the fourth quarter of 2025. Follow the hyperlinks to access the original full text sources.
Unfortunately, KB.L experienced back end technical problems which shut down the website for two months. This prevented the production of a summary digest for August and September.

‘Climateflation’ & Water Scarcity: Africa's Food Security Emergency
See: Climateflation and Water Scarcity: Why Africa Faces the World's Sharpest Food-Security Risks | African Arguments, December 2025
Q4 2025 witnessed the convergence of two existential threats to Africa's food systems: ‘climateflation’ and water scarcity.

Understanding Climateflation
Climateflation differs fundamentally from traditional inflation. When rains fail, harvests collapse. When floods destroy roads, food cannot reach markets. When heat fosters pests, farmers must spend more on pesticides—costs passed directly to consumers. As one analysis notes, this is "a supply shock that no central banker can tame with higher interest rates."
The consequences are global. Food crises do not respect borders. Extreme weather-driven harvest failures in Africa contribute to global price surges and increased food market volatility, sending shockwaves across supply chains and aid budgets worldwide.
In Lagos, maize prices doubled within a single year. In Ethiopia's northeast, families spend 65-75% of their income on food. Across the Sahel and Southern Africa, erratic rainfall has become the norm rather than exception.

Water Scarcity: The Deeper Threat
Water scarcity, not land scarcity, is the true constraint on Africa's agricultural future.

• Agriculture consumes 80% of Africa's freshwater, even as aquifers drain faster than they refill
• By 2025, three billion people globally will live in water-stressed regions, with Africa at the epicentre

Five consecutive failed rainy seasons have left Somalia facing mass food insecurity. In southern Africa, dwindling river flows have crippled irrigation systems. Morocco has embarked on a desperate race to build desalination plants to combat creeping desertification.
Yet water scarcity is not merely a climate problem—it is a governance and justice problem. Controlling water means controlling power over economies, livelihoods, and security itself.

Water Governance & Power
See: How Control of Water Shapes Power and Security in Africa | Anthony Turton, The Conversation, November 2025

Water as National Security
Water is not merely an agricultural input—it is fundamental to national security. Controlling water creates security upon which economies and societies can flourish. Without water security, there is no food security, no economic stability, no investment, and ultimately, no state security.
This principle reshapes understanding of conflicts across Africa. The Nile River, at 6,650km and draining 10% of the entire African continent, flows through 11 riparian states: Burundi, DRC, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has become the latest flashpoint, with Egypt claiming sovereign rights while Ethiopia exercises control. As one legal scholar notes, the matter is "legally complicated and politically fraught."

Transboundary Rivers as Borders & Battlegrounds
Border demarcation along rivers reveals how colonial legacies continue shaping present-day water disputes. The Chobe River island dispute between Botswana and Namibia, disputed after Namibia's independence, was ultimately decided by the International Court of Justice based on the "thalweg" (the deepest part of the river). But thalwegs shift with major floods, making borders fluid and contested.
The Orange River offers an even starker case. At 2,200km, it passes through Lesotho, South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia. Yet the border between South Africa and Namibia was defined in 1890 along the Namibian bank (high-water mark) rather than the thalweg—a deliberate British colonial decision to deny German South-West Africa reliable water access for security reasons. This colonial logic persists, shaping resource access and regional stability a century later.

Water Security as Development Security
When Cape Town approached "Day Zero" in 2018—the prospect of literally running out of water—the global attention revealed a hard truth: water security shapes investment, migration, and economic development. Capital flows to regions with water security; people migrate from water-scarce to water-secure areas. Yet over the past four decades, the African population nearly trebled, leading to uncontrolled migration from rural to urban areas that has overwhelmed water infrastructure.
Without water security and proper governance, social stability collapses, investors flee, and nations face existential crises.

Land Laws: A Continental Scan
See: New Agriculture Laws You Should Know in 2025 | AgroCentric, October 2025

2025 witnessed significant legislative activity across the continent, with governments implementing land use reforms, digitization initiatives, and customary tenure reforms. These moves reflect both progressive ambitions and deepening contradictions.

South Africa - The Expropriation Act
South Africa's new Expropriation Act replaced apartheid-era 1975 legislation, setting clearer rules for land takings in the public interest. Significantly, the law permits nil compensation for abandoned land and ensures court oversight—offering potential pathways for smallholder redistribution from commercial estates, though implementation remains contentious.

Nigeria - Digitizing Land Records
Nigeria's National Land Registration and Titling Programme aims to formalize land ownership within a decade. While framed as reducing disputes and attracting investment, critics note this process may accelerate dispossession of customary landholders lacking formal documentation.

Tanzania - Customary Tenure Strengthening (with Contradictions)
Tanzania's revised land policy (March 2025) prioritizes village land-use planning while allowing diaspora access through derivative rights. However, simultaneous expansion of large-scale agri-investments creates puts mounting pressure on customary lands.

Uganda - Customary Rights Recognition
Uganda's courts delivered a landmark ruling affirming that customary landowners hold enforceable rights, not merely tenancy. This precedent boosts the legitimacy of customary certificates and may complicate state expropriations and large-scale lease negotiations—a significant victory for indigenous land rights.

Ethiopia - Land Certification Expansion
Ethiopia's land certification program has expanded, though questions remain about secure implementation and protection against displacement through state-led development projects.

Kenya – GMO contestation
On March 7, 2025, Kenya’s Court of Appeal halted government promotion and imports of GM foods pending the resolution of ongoing cases. This does not repeal earlier policy moves, but it pauses aggressive scale-up and imports while the courts scrutinise the process and risk assessment.

Land Redistribution as Justice: The ICARRD+20 Declaration
See: Why Land Redistribution Must Be Central to Human Flourishing | Prof. Ian Scoones, PLAAS, October 2025

​In October 2025, the PLAAS-convened "Land, Life and Society" conference brought together land reform movements, peasant organizations, and academics to prepare for the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Cartagena, Colombia, February 2026.
The resulting Cape Town Declaration reasserts a principle international policy has marginalized: land redistribution is not merely a development tool—it is a justice imperative.
The Four-Point DeclarationThe Declaration demands:
1. Halt and Reverse Land Concentration: There is urgent need to focus on redistribution of land and resources, including water, to widen access and control. Land occupation by poor and working people who are landless must be decriminalised, and the social utility of land and territory recognised.
2. Reject Market-Based Reform: Market-based land reforms have failed. Redistribution efforts must not rely on markets and must include not only classic transfers of plots to poorer and landless peoples, but also wider redistribution of control over land and water, restructuring relationships to redress inequality.
3. Collective Alternatives for Diverse Contexts: Land distribution cannot focus narrowly on individual private property or it will fail. A wider range of property relations must be acknowledged. While individual plots with secure tenure may be part of the solution, collective, shared resources are crucial—particularly for pastoralists using wider landscapes through mobility.
4. Prioritize Marginalized Guardians: Indigenous peoples, marginalised ethnic groups and castes, women and youth, and migrants in need must be at the centre of redistributive land reform efforts. These communities are effective guardians of land and natural resources.
This Declaration directly counters mainstream development wisdom that continues promoting failed tenure and governance solutions. It reclaims redistribution as justice and reasserts collective solutions alongside individual tenure security—a significant intellectual and political realignment.

Mining's Land Footprint: Green Minerals, Dirty Dispossession
See: Whose Transition is it Anyway? | African arguments, Charlize Tomaselli, November 2025

• Keystone Industry: How Mining Became Planet's Unlikely Saviour | Parts 1-3, Daily Maverick, November 2025

• The Devastating Toll of Cobalt Mining Leaves Over 32 Dead in Congo | HRRC, December 2025

Q4 2025 confirmed the contradiction at the heart of the global "green transition": extracting the minerals necessary for clean energy requires massive territorial expansion into indigenous, pastoral, and agricultural lands—and the dispossession of communities depending on these lands.
In Zimbabwe's Buhera District, families face displacement for lithium projects destined for European electric vehicles. Farms, homes, and even graves have been dug up in pursuit of lithium. Yet graves, homes, and livelihoods do not figure into G20 metrics of success; what matters is securing a "stable supply" of lithium for global markets.

In Ulanga, Tanzania, graphite mining threatens food security as fertile farmland is swallowed by pits. For G20 leaders, graphite is a "strategic mineral"; for farmers, it is a threat to survival.
In the DRC's Ruashi, cobalt extraction leaves water poisoned and children ill, even as cobalt is celebrated in G20 communiqués as vital for "clean" batteries and "green" energy.

Serving as G20 president in 2025, South Africa exemplifies the dilemma. President Ramaphosa markets South Africa's "strategic nonalignment" as sovereignty, yet in practice risks becoming a broker between competing imperial centers—facilitating access for all sides while communities at home bear the costs.

Beneath the language of "green transition" lies a familiar logic: Africa is cast as the quarry for the world's future industries. Mining regions become sacrifice zones where communities face land dispossession, disrupted livelihoods, environmental degradation, and cultural loss.

The human toll is explicit. The "clean energy" narrative obscures this reality: the minerals fuelling electric vehicles and renewable systems come coated in community displacement and environmental contamination.

Climate Finance: $1.3 Trillion Promised, Communities Waiting
See: COP30 Developing Deadlock: Will the Promised Loss and Damage Climate Finance Funds Materialise? | Daily Maverick, November 2025

COP30 concluded Q4 with pledges of $1.3 trillion in climate finance—yet the funds languish in donor bureaucracies while communities most impacted by climate change face escalating crises.
The Loss and Damage Fund, promised as compensation for climate impacts beyond adaptation, remains underfunded. Developing nations argue the promised amounts are insufficient and conditional, while developed nations delay disbursement.

For African communities dependent on agriculture and pastoral livelihoods, climate finance pledges mean nothing when they cannot access credit, cannot buy drought-resistant seeds, cannot repair irrigation infrastructure, and cannot diversify their economies away from climate-vulnerable agriculture.
The disconnect between COP promises and community reality represents a profound failure of international climate governance.

Carbon Offsets: Another Extraction Scheme?
See: Assessments Argue Carbon Offsets Are Failing Communities and Climate Goals | GRAIN Commentary, December 2025

​GRAIN argues that carbon offset schemes - promoted as market-based climate solutions – are failing both communities and climate goals. Communities where offsets are implemented report minimal benefit, while climate mitigation outcomes remain questionable.
Carbon offsets are increasingly revealed to be yet another mechanism by which Northern corporations extract value from African land and resources, this time under the guise of climate action.