For the past 60 years since independence, the government is proud to have recorded remarkable achievements in the land and Human Settlement sectors, especially on planning, surveying, issuance of title deeds as well as enabling Tanzanians to have better human settlements. This was said here on Sunday by the Minister for Land, Housing and Human Settlement Development, William Lukuvi, while addressing journalists on the success that has so far been attained in the country's 60 years of independence.
According to the Minister, when Tanzania got her independence, official land ownership stood at 26,499 but currently registers 2,067,044 land ownership countrywide. Also the Minister said, 112,787 human settlement licences have so far been provided to people living in unplanned urban areas, adding that some of them use the documents as collaterals to acquire loans in order to carry out different economic activities.
By issuing title deeds, Mr. Lukuvi said, the government had contributed immensely in economic empowerment to also enable Tanzanians, use them as documents to acquire loans from different financial institutions. He further said that his Ministry had put up a proper system for solving land disputes by bringing closer to people land services countrywide. For the past 10 years (2011-2021) according to Mr. Lukuvi, the government had collected 735,8bn/- from the land sector, making revenue from the sector to increase from 1,4bn/- in 1996/1997 to about 121bn/- in 2021/2022.
"Our target for this financial year (2021/2022) is to collect 221bn/- because we want to see this sector contributing immensely to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)," he said. According to Mr. Lukuvi, his ministry was currently implementing a project for planning, surveying and providing title deeds to all landlords countrywide, that is why last month President Samia Suluhu Hassan provided 50bn/- for the exercise.
On the Housing sector, the Minister said the government had also recorded notable achievements seeing the National Housing Corporation (NHC) erecting about 2,728 buildings with 18,622 units in different parts of the country. "These resources make NHC to have a capital base of 5tril./- and residential houses constituting 59 percent, while business houses constitute 41 percent," said the Minister adding that of all the houses, 59,3 percent were located in Dar es Salaam.
Mr. Lukuvi said that 18,708 houses were helping the state-owned housing corporation to get about 8bn/- in revenue per month. He added that currently NHC was continuing to build houses for sale, renting and business in almost every district and region in the country and in Dodoma Region, the corporation is implementing a project for building 1,000 houses.