Samuel Kariuki

Samuel Kariuki (Ph.D, Wits), A Kenyan citizen, resident in South Africa, and based at the University of the Witwatersrand, Sociology Department (Johannesburg) has joined the centre as a visiting fellow from 8 July- 4 October, 2004.

Samuel Kariuki’s main research is in the field of land reform programmes in Kenya and South Africa. His doctoral thesis was entitled, “A Comparative Study of Land Reform Policy and Implementation Programme in Post-Independent Kenya (1963) and Post-Apartheid South Africa (1994)”. The thesis focused on the politics of South Africa’s land reform policy process between 1994-1999 and in independent Kenya. His thesis provides a sociological account of the factors/processes that influenced and defined the content of the land reform policy programme in South Africa and Kenya within a context of a negotiated transition to democracy. The central aim of the study was to understand the dynamics of the land reform policy process in independent Kenya and post-apartheid South Africa and the challenges facing the policy implementation process in South Africa between 1994 -1999.

His new research on land reform while at the ASC will be an appendage of his Ph.D thesis. He will focus on South Africa’s post-1999 land reform policy developments based on a comparative analysis with Kenya’s land reform experience. There are two key policies that were introduced in post-1999 in South Africa, namely Land Reform for Agriculture Development (LRAD) and the Communal Land Rights Bill (CLRB). The first project will involve doing a more comprehensive review of the Land Reform for Agricultural Development policy (LRAD). This review will be done against the backdrop of Kenya’s nascent pre-independence land reform initiatives namely the Swynnnerton plan in 1954, which aimed to develop a class of black commercial farmers.

The second project will focus on the second policy - the Communal Land Rights Bill. The proposed bill aims to establish a system of freehold tenure system in the former homelands in an attempt to trigger rural development, which is currently impeded by the insecurity of tenure systems, ineffective administrative systems, boundary disputes and the breakdown of permit systems in rural South Africa. A complete policy review of the draft bill will be done against a back-drop of Kenya’s touted albeit controversial land tenure reform, which was also, one of the key tenets of the pre-independence Swynnerton plan.