Property Law 101
As I mentioned yesterday, Cuttington University has a beautiful campus. Actually, it’s more like an estate with a few academic and residential buildings on it. Everywhere you look, you see open space and vegetation.
In between buildings are natural areas as well as test plots for agricultural research.
And surrounding the campus is undeveloped countryside.
The agriculture and extension courses are taught at classrooms on the far end of campus. Below is the building where Kula Jackson, the Land Lawyer for the Land Commission of Liberia and I co-instructed a short-course on property law and land tenure issues in Liberia. The classroom we used was on the left where the people are standing. The course was originally planned to be two, half-day sessions but, for bureaucratic reasons I won’t get into, we had to condense the material into one, very packed half-day session.
The course was part of a three-week program on agricultural entrepreneurship focused on livestock production. I was asked to give a presentation on property law and land issues by the CEO of Veterinarians Without Borders, who I met at Roberts International Airport as I was on my way home last September. We struck up a conversation, he told me what he did, I told him what I did, I answered a few questions he had about land issues in Liberia, I gave him a few contacts - pretty much the type of thing that happens when you’re connected in a country that people are interested in supporting. A few months later, I received an e-mail from him asking if I could teach a class, and then met a few other folks that were involved in the course to get an idea of what would be useful for the participants.
Our block of instruction was part of a sequence on business practices that included conflict resolution, strategic business planning and development, negotiation skills and land law. I don’t know if it was a fresh change of pace from their blocks on poultry management and disease control, veterinary public health, agricultural safety and zoonosis, and perinatal management and disease in livestock, but the students were definitely engaged in the course. Then again, every Liberian I've met is very concerned about land issues.
The students were generally a bit older than the other students we saw walking to and from classes before ours. Our students seemed to include a mix of straight-up agricultural entrepreneurs, community leaders, agricultural NGOs, and rural women association members. Basically their roles are to go back to their communities and share the information they gained through the training with other members of their clan and community. Kula is the gentleman on the left in the blue jacket.
The participants were very interested in how to properly record a deed, how to best protect their interests in land, and what a new land rights policy being developed in Liberia (which may start coming into effect as early as this coming week) means for their communities and the protection of their rights. They were an engaging group of people that had plenty of questions and made the course a lot easier - it often turned into teaching discussions instead of a lecture, which always makes the classroom experience easier on the teaching end.
After several hours, class was over and it was time to hit the road again. But while we were standing around outside, after the group picture, this little boy walked up to me and said something very quietly. So quietly I couldn’t hear him enough to understand what he said. So I asked what he said and again, his whisper was so soft I couldn’t hear him. Then he held my hand. One of the women said, “He probably wants you to take his picture!” So we walked over and I sat him down for photos. Oddly enough, he didn’t lower the snack from his mouth the whole time, and almost seemed disinterested in the pictures after I took them. But he seemed happy that his picture was taken and then he walked away.
So we packed up, added one of the EHELD (Excellence in Higher Education for Liberian Development) staff to the three of us in the vehicle and started out on the 4 hour trip back to Monrovia. As we were driving through Cuttington University I took one last photograph that is so typical of Liberia.
