Private ownership is a property arrangement in which full and exclusive rights to decide about the property are given to a single person (natural or artificial) or group of persons. The owner shall have the right to use, possess, receive income from it, or alienate it gratuitously or for consideration. As mentioned earlier, in countries following the Roman law system, the usual way to describe ownership rights is of usus, fructus, and abusus. Modern writers add one important element to these rights: the right to exclude others from using and possessing the property.¹¹

The experiences of many countries concerning land show that farming plots, residential land plots, buildings, easements (streets to serve the land property) are owned privately. In western countries, forest land, small lakes, streets and rural roads are also subject to private ownership.

The current governing land legislations in Ethiopia are mainly the FDRE Rural Land Administration and Use (RLAUP) 456/2005 and the Urban Land Lease Proclamation 711/2011, which are in place to govern rural and urban land respectively. Besides, the FDRE Constitution, FDRE Expropriation Proclamation 455/2005, and the Ethiopian Civil Code are relevant. Based on the above review, when one looks at the land ownership in Ethiopia, the ground (surface earth) is not subject to private ownership (see Article 40(3) of FDRE constitution). Land belongs to the state and the people, and is not subject of sale and exchange. This means that it is futile to classify the land paradigms in Ethiopia from pure ownership perspective. Rather, the land right provided, as termed in the RLAUP, is known as “holding right.” It is less of ownership in that the holder lacks the power of sale and exchange¹² (details are given in Sect. 2.6).

Based on the above information, when one looks into the FDRE RLAUP 456/2005, one finds under Article 2(11), “private holdings” referring to private farming plots given to peasant farmers, pastoralists and semi-pastoralists. It is not clear about the private plots to be given to pastoralists, though. But, the assumption is that the plots may be those which the pastoralists will use for settlement or housing, rather than for grazing, which is communal in nature. Private land plots that are provided to peasants in the highlands are used for farming and housing. In urban area, land that is acquired through lease or government grant is considered as a private possession.

As opposed to private ownership, communal ownership is a property right allocation made in the interest of group of users. Here, there is no single individual in a privileged position to control and have command over all of the resources. In a system of communal property, rules governing access to and control of material resources are organized on the basis that each resource is, in principle, available for the use of every member alike. As noted by Clark and Kohler, writers on property law, “The defining characteristic of communal property is that every member of the community has the right not to be excluded from the resource.”¹³ In principle, the needs and wants of every person are considered, and when allocative decisions are made they are made on a basis that is in some sense fair to all.¹⁴

The most usual types of properties owned in common are grazing lands, forest lands, fisheries, irrigation systems, underground water, water wells, village roads, neighborhood streets, and so on.

The common feature of such properties is that they are not destined to an exclusive use of an individual person; every member of the community wants them equally. The other feature is that most of them are exhaustible, if left to anybody as open or free access. Even in case of allocation of such properties to specific part of society, the resources may be quickly depleted and individual members may not be encouraged to conserve unless the use and enjoyment is regulated by an internal sets of rules.

This is because people tend to care less for what is common as compared to what is their own. As modern economists argue, when the incentive to care and conserve is less than the cost of so doing, people will not go for conservation. One such modern economic theorist is Harold Demsetz, who argues that people give less care to what is common property, since the cost of taking care is higher than the benefit gained. The primary function of private property becomes a guiding incentive to achieve a greater “internalization of externalities.”¹⁵ In this way, individuals are made to bear the costs and benefits of their own activities, and to absorb the costs of inflicting spillover effects upon others.

According to Demsetz, if land is held in common, it is likely each user will not feel the full impact, in terms of the benefits but particularly the costs of his use. When, for example, many individuals use a forest to produce wood, no one has an incentive to increase the forest population (e.g. by replanting when a tree is cut), since the benefits of his doing so will redound to others as well as himself. In other words, while he internalizes (suffers from or is burdened with) the costs of planting trees, it will be others who will reap the benefit. If this is the case, any rational person will not invest his money and time for the care of the forest land, unless he is sure that the benefit of his doing is by far greater than the cost he incurred; or at least that he is sure that others will also do the same.

In the absence of such assurance, the common property will be depleted quickly and will face what Hardin called “The Tragedy of the Commons”, a situation where common or open access resources exhausted quickly by unregulated overexploitation.¹⁶ For this reason privatizing the land resource or setting internal rules are usually come up as solutions to the problem.

The difference between private ownership and communal ownership is that while in the former case the owner can sell his property, in the latter case, owner members may not be able to transfer their right by way of sale, especially to non-members.

Furthermore, in a well-functioning communal property situation, the users have certain rights and duties among themselves with respect to possession, use, and enjoyment of benefits from the resource. For example, in a regulated irrigation system, all participants have the right to divert water for specific time; they also have the correlate duty of not exceeding their assigned rate so as not to interfere with others’ water flow. Although by and large the internal rules governing the use of the common property are prepared by the members themselves, their enforcement or implementation may need state intervention.¹⁷

In Ethiopia according to Article 2(12) of the FDRE RLAUP 456/2005, “communal holding” is “rural land which is given by the government to local residents for common grazing, forestry and other social services.” This list is just an illustrative one and what are given are only examples. The government may allocate additional land as communal ones, if the local community needs it for some social or economic activities. Thus, land necessary for religious ceremonies, cultural festivities, or social gatherings may be permanently allocated to the village community in common. Besides grazing and forest land, one may also add irrigation systems (although the irrigable land may be private holding), water wells (especially in pastoralist areas), small rivers, hills,¹⁸ etc. to the list of communal lands.

To describe “state ownership” of land, terms like “public ownership”, “collective ownership” or “government ownership” are also employed. Under the 1960 Ethiopian Civil Code, the term “public domain” is used for the same purpose. In any case, in this discussion, they shall be used interchangeably as the need arises.

In order to give additional explanation on the subject, it is proper to see the usage of the terms in some literature and legislations. The terms “state or government ownership” seem to denote the ownership of land by the political body, a central or municipal level, while “public or collective ownership” seems to signify the ownership of land by all the people or by the local community. It does not mean, however, that this definition would be fully acceptable; one has to rely on the legislation of the respective country to decide the actual meanings. Writers on property and land ownership, though, use the above terms interchangeably.¹⁹ Equally, others give different meanings. For example, the Chinese Land Law treats “collective ownership” and “state ownership” differently. Collective is understood as a village land committee, and farmers are forced to lease farm lands from these committees:

According to the 1982 Constitution…the structure of land ownership seems relatively clear that, in principle, natural resources and urban land are state-owned, while suburban and rural lands are collectively owned.²⁰

In any case, what is important is to know that material resources are answerable to the needs and purposes of society as a whole, irrespective of the fact that the decision maker is the central government, a special national committee, or a village committee. The assumption is that even though it is the state which owns the land, the objective is to use it in the best interest of society in general. For example, in many countries²¹ urban land owned by city municipalities or local governments is used to benefit society, such as the provision for low cost housing.

Practically, there are no real differences between the dichotomy of the “state or government” on one hand, and the “collective or public” ownership of land on the other. My argument is that since the government, as a political body, puts itself as the representative of the people, the power of administration and allocation of land property is, most of the time, vested in the hands of the state, and hence the state becomes the sole decision maker. If, for example, we look into the land ownership system in former socialist countries, land was owned by the collective or the public, but the state was the real decision maker; citizens had use right only.²² In Ethiopia we find the same approach in reading Articles 40(3) and 89(5) of the FDRE Constitution, where the “state” and the “people” are considered as two joint owners of land and natural resources, but the state is represented to administer it on behalf of the people.

The FDRE RLAUP identifies, under Article 2(13), “forestlands, wildlife protected areas, state farms, mining lands, lakes, rivers and other rural lands,” as state holding lands. In this case, “other rural lands” means all land which is not held privately or communally. State land in Ethiopia means, land held by Federal or Regional government or by city municipalities. Rural land held by Regional governments is administered by woredas, while urban land is administered by respective city/town administrations. This means woredas and city administrations have the power to give and take land. The Federal government holds vast tracts of land found in lowland rural areas of the country destined to be transferred for large-scale agricultural investments.

All urban land which is not occupied by private lessees is held by the government/municipality. Although it is not mentioned in the current lease proclamation, one can assume that all city streets, sewerage systems, parks, highways, and empty spaces must belong to the state.

One question that may be raised is that what can be done if the new land proclamations (urban and rural) fail to address all the issues? Definitely, we go to the Civil Code. It must be stressed that the land legislations must be considered as supplements or modifications to the Civil Code. Further, since in no where the Civil Code is clearly abrogated, as far as its provisions are not contrary to the existing land legislations, it must continue its function. The concept of public property of urban areas, both in the Civil Code and the current land legislations is basically similar. Based on this argument, we may apply the Civil Code provisions on “public domain” to determine the situation of public/state lands in urban areas.²³

The Ethiopian Civil Code under Articles 1444–1459 presents the nature and status of public lands in urban areas. To see the details, all [urban] lands owned by the state or administrative bodies are to be treated as “private lands” or as “public domains” (Article 1444). Although the provision lacks clarity, it must be understood as follows. All land owned by the state (centrally or through its various branches) is treated either as “private” or as “public.” “Private” means the state organ that owns (holds in today’s situation) land will have the right to exclude others from access and use. For example, state business enterprises (such as, banks, insurances, transport companies, telecom companies or energy companies) or administrative bodies (such as ministry of agriculture, ministry of finance) all happen to hold land and buildings. There is no reason that they should make their property open to all, and such land holdings will be treated as private holdings and governed by the civil code part that governs private property.

On the other hand, there are other types of state lands whose use and enjoyment are put at a “public disposal”, or by their nature they are “destined to a public service”. These are the type of land or buildings that are termed as “public domain,” (Article 1445) and the law tries to define their character. Since the definition of their character is not enough to identify them, the Code, under Article 1446, provides an example of such properties: roads, streets, canals, railways; seashores, port installations and lighthouse; buildings specially adapted for public services such as fortifications and churches. Thus, roads, streets, railways, canals are examples of properties put at public disposal.

As quoted in Pankhurst, Job Ludolf, a seventeenth century German historian, is said to summarize the power of Ethiopian kings as follows: “The power of the Abyssinian Kings is absolute, as well in Ecclesiastical as Civil Affairs.”²⁹ Other travelers and writers also testified that Ethiopian monarchs had been absolute over the people and their objects.³⁰ Concerning land, the general claim, in the feudalistic Ethiopia, was that all land belonged to the king. Thus, all land rights emanated from the benevolent gift of the king to his subjects and the Church. The ideological background behind such claim was that land was acquired through conquest of local tribes by the Ethiopian kings to whom the land of the conquered was transferred in ownership as spoil of war. The state demanded an obligation of tribute from all land (except those which belonged to the church), as tax obligation was attached to land rather than a person.³¹ The idea of royal ownership of all land in Ethiopia was documented by royal chroniclers of different kings.³² For example, upon the purchase of land by king Lalibela (1200–1250) to construct his well known rock hewn churches in Roha, his hagiographer asked rhetorically to show the traditional power of the monarch in the distribution of lands: “who would have forbidden the king if he had decided to take the land [without purchase]?”³³ In his famous conflict with the monastic leaders, Emperor Amda-Sion (1314–1344) is said to have demanded their absolute obedience to him because they lived ‘on the land of the king’. His son and successor, Sayfe-Arad (1344–72), is also said to have made the claim that ‘God gave (all the) land to me’.³⁴ A more practical example of this royal prerogative over land is furnished by the abundant records of land grants made by Ethiopian kings in their name to various churches and monasteries.³⁵

The northern part of Ethiopia is the cradle of Ethiopian civilization. It is believed that after the establishment of the state at the northern city of Axum, around 100 B.C, it slowly expanded southward until it took its present shape during the late nineteenth century.³⁶ As shown above, although all land was considered property of the emperors, it was distributed to different users on different conditions. Hence, the land tenure system in the northern part of feudalistic Ethiopia may generally be classified as private holdings, church lands and state lands.

The southern, south eastern and south western provinces of Ethiopia were brought under Emperor Menelik’s rule during the last third of the nineteenth century, above all between 1875 and 1889,⁶⁵ and most land of the southern people was expropriated/confiscated and alienated to northerners. In areas where the people accepted Menelik’s rule voluntarily, traditional chiefs were allowed to retain their position and land.⁶⁶ Landed property continued to belong to the inhabitants exactly as in the older autonomous provinces of the northern part of the country.⁶⁷ The most successful, among these, were the present Wollega, Jimma, and Benishangul regions. On the contrary, the land of the rebels who resisted the entry of Menelik’s forces, after being defeated, was confiscated and distributed to nobles, the church, Menelik’s generals and soldiers, while the people remained landless gabbars. ⁶⁸ The upper elites were empowered with appropriation of all taxes for themselves by passing a fraction of it to the sovereign. They were also given estates to cultivate for their own use.⁶⁹

Land acquired through confiscation was then distributed on three-thirds or four quarter basis. The new rulers took either two-third or three-quarters of the land and left the remaining fraction (one third or one quarter) to the local chief who was then known as balabat (gentry). This last part of land is known as siso (a third) land. The big portion of land taken by the new settlers was shared between the church and the military based on the same principle applied in the Northern provinces. The amount of land distribution was 1–3 gasha (1 gasha is 40 ha) for a soldier, 10 gashas for hamsa–aleqa (commander of fifty), 20 gashas for meto–aleqa (lieutenant), 30 gashas for shamble (captain)⁷⁰ and so on.

Such land was granted on the basis of different conditions or names. Some are given as rist–gult or siso–gult, such as those given to the local chiefs; some as maderia (in lieu of salary for civil servant, war veterans, on condition of serving the state in time of war), and some as ginda bel, on condition of carrying tents, cannons, guarding prisoners and so on. The land given to the church was parceled out as samon land in the same fashion as had been done in the north.

A major characteristic of the development was, thus, the allocation of land to the new administrators and their followers, while leaving the natives landless. People from the north were encouraged to settle in these new areas and became beneficiaries of land grant or land purchase. This was done for two reasons: first, to recompense for their service in the war, and second, in order to create “effective occupation”⁷¹ of the newly annexed territories.

The native people, who now became landless, were paradoxically given the name gabbars. This name did not connote the same meaning as it had in the north; in the north the name was given for a landed peasant who paid his tax, while in the south the person was landless. The gabbars in the south, rather, became servants of those who took their land.⁷² Quoted by Pankhurst, C.F. Ray, a traveler to Ethiopia by that time, reflected that the nobles and their followers had considerable dependents upon them. The gabbar was a tenant subjected to more onerous burdens than existed elsewhere. The gabbar was obliged to look after the settlers by cultivating their land, providing labor, building houses and so on for free.⁷³ The general practice was that a person who got land in the south, reserved some part of the land for his private use (cultivated by the gabbars for him), and distributed the remaining part of the land to his gabbars and collected tribute (one third for himself) and tithe (to the government) and allowed them to subsist on the remaining produce. A study made by Markakis on Kembata district in the southern provinces vividly shows the circumstances that existed at the time:

Kenyazmach (commander of right wing) Arado was allotted forty gashas (1,600 ha) of land for his service in Kambata district. He kept twelve gashas and distributed the rest among his lieutenants and soldiers. One of these, a man from Gojam named Ayele, was given a total of four gashas. The native people who found themselves on the land granted to Ayele became his gabbars (the total family member was 40 people). Ayele settled in the nearby town of Hosana, the capital of Kembata district. Ayele divided his land into hudad (good land reserved for him) and other which was distributed among the gabbars. The gabbars cultivated the hudad and delivered the entire produce to Ayele. Ayele also collected a third of the produce from the other land as a tribute for himself, and another tenth which he turned over to the state as tithe. The gabbars were also required to provide Ayele with firewood, to grind his share of the grain and deliver it to his home in town, and to repair his house and warehouses. In addition, they had to offer him obligatory gifts on Christmas, Easter, and Maskal. Ayele acted as the judge for his gabbars, and in his capacity imposed fines and collected fees. Whenever he visited his land, the gabbars were obliged to provide him with a feast.⁷⁴

On the other hand, the rights of local gentries were remained unaffected because of Menelik’s decree passed in 1905 (1897 E.C), which declares that in every land allocation to northern nobles, a third or in some cases half of it should be kept to the local balabat, gentry.⁷⁵ This is, as already mentioned above known as siso–gult.

The other characteristic of the southern land tenure was that the introduction of private ownership of land tenure. It is generally held that private land ownership in the south evolved out of Menelik’s expropriation and redistribution of land after his conquest.⁷⁶ Many evidences and the wordings of the then laws showed that land was transacted through sale from state to individuals and among individuals. Emperor Menelik also introduced new land measurement (qelad) and a tax system, based on the measured lands in the southern regions. The new land taxes imposed on siso land, maderia land and rist land were actually paid by the actual cultivator, the gabbars, instead of the owner of the land which increased yet the burdens of the gabbars and tenants.

The coming of Emperor Haileselassie I, in 1930, to the throne in the early twenty first century and his modernist approach of governance started to contribute to the declining role of the traditional land tenure system, especially to the abolition of the gult system in 1966. The traditional tax collection system (in kind) did not enable to generate enough money to the state to create the much needed modern state, with modern salaried military and bureaucracy. As discussed above, land tax in the form of tribute and tithe was collected by the gult holder in the northern provinces and the land owner/holder in the southern parts. Because it was difficult to find enough gold and dollars, tax was paid in kind⁷⁷ (grain, salt, honey, cattle and so on). As a result, government agents were forced to take it to market to change it to cash money. The system was not efficient and there was no strong bureaucracy to control its proper collection; land owners used to squander it. Studies show that the share of land tax was declining compared to indirect taxes (customs tax) throughout the 1940s–1970s.⁷⁸ To rectify such problem and in order to collect enough money from land, successive decrees concerning land tenure and land tax were promulgated well up to the 1970s.

As noted by Hoben, traditionally there was relatively little separation between political power, the control of land, and wealth. Men who enjoyed high positions of secular authority usually controlled much land. They were also at the apex of a redistributional economic organization. They collected tax and tribute from those over whom they held authority and expended a large portion of it again on the feasts and followers that were essential to the maintenance of their political power and their legitimacy in the eye of their subjects.⁷⁹ So, it was not easy for the government to weaken the power of the landed autocrats by eroding their traditional power of tax collection, administration and adjudication. That is why, as we shall see soon, the reformative process encountered strong resistance not only from the landed aristocrats but also, ignorantly, from the peasant farmers as well.

Hoben provides four reasons that weakened the traditional power of gult holders⁸⁰: the growth of bureaucracy that replaces their administrative power, tax reform that demands the direct payment of tax to government rather than to gult holders, emergence and establishment of modern court system that replaces their adjudication power, and finally the establishment of modern military that took away their power as collectors of local soldiers. In here, we will briefly look into the tax reform that had directly affected the land tenure system.

Before the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia (1936–1941), the government tried to come up with two decrees⁸¹ that tried to reduce the burden of the gabbars of the southern people. Especially, a decree promulgated on May 9, 1935 tried to reduce the burden of the peasantry by replacing all duties with payment of 30 thalers per gasha.⁸² But, of course, this was the eve of the Italian invasion and the rule was not implemented. The government came up with series of laws related to land tax after the expulsion of the Italian forces (after the Second World War) which we shall see hereunder. The Italians, during their 5 years occupation, had abolished all informal taxes and burdens except the land tax (tribute) and the tithe (asrat). After liberation, the government took advantage of this situation and continued the process without restoring the previous system. The major laws enacted after this period are discussed below.

Over the years, the land holding in the southern provinces had slowly changed into private (freehold) holdings through different decrees. As opposed to the north, land in the south was freely transferable by way of sale. Like his predecessor, Haile Sellassie also continued to grant land to different groups. Immediately after the Italian war, he granted extensive land to patriots, exiles, soldiers and civil servants as private property. This policy, however, was of little benefit to tenant gabbars. Indeed, from the nearly 5 million ha of land allocated after 1941, only a few thousand reached the landless and the unemployed gabbars.⁹² The concept of rist, as lineage land property, was not known in this part of the country. Hence, in the 1950s and 1960s extensive land sale was witnessed, especially the transfer from land owners to new investors.⁹³ But the effect of such measures made the existing gabbars once and for all landless tenants. Tenants, thus, were forced to cultivate on share-cropping arrangement which was said to be unjust in that it claimed 75 % of the produce to the landlord.⁹⁴

As already mentioned above (Sect. 2.4.4), in spite of the fact that the government passed laws that forbid other burdens, tenants were subjected to feudal dues like working on the landlord’s farm and giving him presents on special occasions for fear of eviction. Powerful lords of the land continued to confiscate peasant’s property at will and to evict tenants arbitrarily even on the eve of the Revolution.⁹⁵ In addition to the fact that the system was seen as unjust, it was considered inefficient and unproductive for it did not give the tenants incentive to produce more because, it was alleged, they lost a lot of the increased produce to the landlord.⁹⁶ The most radical criticism of the land-tenure system came from the student movement, which, since the middle of the 1960s, made the slogan “Land to the Tiller” its main rallying call and the attainment of land reform its main target. When, as of 1969, the issue surfaced concerning whether the southern part of the country was not a case of settler colonialism by people from the north, and whether, therefore, the southern tenants were reduced to this status on land which had once been their own, land reform acquired a much greater political poignancy than ever before.⁹⁷ Also, academics, foreign governments and aid agencies were very critical of the existing land-tenure system and urged for some kind of reform to be adopted.

One of Haile Sellassie’s government responses to these criticisms was the establishment of a Ministry of Land Reform and Administration to deal with the matter.⁹⁸ One notion promoted by that ministry, well before 1974, was the redistribution of individually owned land in excess of 20 ha. A draft proposal to that effect was shelved for lack of support in government circles. The fact that the government officials and members of parliament had their economic and hence political power based on land was often attributed as a cause for the obstruction of the adoption of the draft proposal. Harold Marcus, a prominent historian on Ethiopia, claims that after the 1960 cope d’état, the Emperor was forced to “rely increasingly on overt military power for authority and on the aristocracy and oligarchy for administrative support. Since the last two represented the property-owning classes, Haile Sellassie was unable to implement significant land reform, in the absence of which the intelligentsia and the students, at first quietly and then stridently, opposed the regime.”⁹⁹

The emperor was generally said to be slow in taking a radical and important land reform that would have a socio-political effect. A contemporary researcher and professor at the then Faculty of Law at the Haile Sellassie I University, Harrison Dunning observed that:

Beyond the elimination of personal services, it is difficult to name an objective related to land and designed to improve the social and political position of the Ethiopian peasantry toward which even partial action has been taken in the past quarter century. Even public discussion of such objectives has not occurred. With guidelines so unclear, it is fruitless to attempt to evaluate the contribution which land reform could make in these areas of national development.¹⁰⁰

By way of conclusion, it can be said that the resistance of the peasantry population (because of ignorance on the advantage of land measurement and registration), internal resistance for land reform from the landed aristocrats, most of whom sate in both chambers of the parliament,¹⁰¹ and the lack of action by the government¹⁰² itself to bring about change in the tenure system were the reasons for absence of meaningful change in the property right arrangement during the eve of the downfall of the imperial regime.

When the Derg revealed its ten-point program of “Ethiopian Socialism” on December 20 1974, it declared that “land would be owned by the people.”¹⁰⁷ And the “people” appeared to be identified under point No. 7 which stated that “the right to own land shall be restricted to those who work on the land”¹⁰⁸ which means that land would be privatized. Nevertheless, when the much anticipated proclamation¹⁰⁹ lastly came out on March 4 1975, the Derg ruled out for public/state ownership of all rural land.

The main reasons for the nationalization of rural land from the previous owners/holders and its transfer to state ownership are envisaged in the preamble of the proclamation. Without the need to reproduce the whole preamble, we pinpoint the main essence as follows:

Whereas, in countries like Ethiopia a person’s right, honor, status, and standard of living is determined by his relation to land;… that several thousands gas has of land was grabbed by insignificant number of feudal lords while the masses live under serfdom;… that it is necessary to change the past injustices and lay a base upon which Ethiopians may live in equality, freedom and fraternity;…that development could be achieved through the abolition of exploitation of many by the few;…In order to increase productivity by making the tiller the owner of the fruits of his labour;…to provide work for all rural people;…it becomes necessary to distribute land and increase rural income and thereby laying the basis for the expansion of industry.

To implement this objective, Article 3 of the proclamation clearly declared that: “all rural lands shall be the collective property of the Ethiopian people,” and it prohibits any person, business organization (company) or other organization from holding rural land in private ownership (Article 3.2 of Proc. 31/1975). By doing so, the law once and for all eliminated any private ownership of rural land, which had started to flourish in the southern part of the country, and it overnight abolished the age-old tenure system of the country in general. Further, the law denied any compensation for the loss of land and any forest and tree-crops thereon. On the other hand, it provided that fair compensation would be paid for movable properties and permanent works on the land (Article 3.3). Nonetheless, when it came to practice, the Derg paid no compensation at all to such properties across the country.

The proclamation, on the other hand, created free access to land to the many rural landless and tenants. Without discrimination of any kind, the law provided opportunity for any person, who was willing to cultivate, to get rural land sufficient for his maintenance (Article 4.1). The size of land to be allocated for a household was made to be, as far as possible, equal, and allowed for a maximum of 10 ha (Article 4.3). No person was allowed to use hired laborers to cultivate his land (except the weak, the sick, widows, and minors (Article 4.5).

Until land distribution was to be carried out, it was stated that all “tenants or hired laborer shall have possessory right over the land they till;” on the other hand, “a resident landowner who has leased out all his lands shall have the right to equally share to the land with his tenants” (Article 6.1). The proclamation also abolished any landlord-tenant relationship, and the tenant was made free from any rent, debt or any other obligation. Likewise, a landowner who gave his land as antichresis to his tenants would be free from payment of the debt (Article 6.3). All large-scale farms, held by private investments, were transferred to state ownership or cooperatives.

Since land became state/public property, it was also important to delimit the scope of rights to be given to individual peasants. In this case, it did not give much. Under a title “Prohibition of Transfer of Land,” Article 5 of the proclamation declares:

No person may by sale, exchange, succession, mortgage, antichresis, lease or otherwise transfer his holding to another; provided that upon the death of the holder the wife or husband or minor children of the deceased or where these are not present, any child of the deceased who has attained majority, shall have the right to use the land.

Thus, the proclamation completely prohibited any sale, mortgage, antichresis,¹¹⁰ lease/rent, inheritance (outside of family), donation, or exchange of any sort that affects the land. It seems the government was cautious not to create controversy with the church and the northern land holders since the proclamation did not say anything about church lands, and provided separate provisions related to “communal lands”, specifically rist lands. According to some studies, the total amount of land held by the church by the time was estimated to be 20 % of all arable land and 5 % of all the land in the country.¹¹¹ Concerning rist land, the proclamation under Article 19 provides “peasants in rist and dessa areas shall have possessory rights over the lands they presently till.” It denies any claimant thereafter to come up with new claims. However, unlike the southern parts, in the north, since every plot of land was held by peasants, there was no need for the proclamation to come up with such different provision.

In any case, Articles 3 and 5 of the proclamation had restricted the rights of transfer of land very much and this had a devastating effect to all the previous land owners in the south or rist holders in the north. This proclamation was, therefore, received with mixed sentiments across the country. For tenant farmers and landless peasants, especially of the southern part of the country, the abolition of land ownership removed a major source of exploitation in one case, and provided guaranteed access to land in the other.¹¹² Peasants of the north who owned their own rist land that gave them effective control over it were threatened by a measure which required their security and put them on equal basis with the landless.¹¹³ The rist holders of the north who considered their right to the land as coming from their family and no one else, considered it as encroachment in their God given rights. According to some studies, in the Northern Province of Tigray, farmers out rightly refuted the law and a war ensued immediately.¹¹⁴ Armed struggle was declared and carried out by supporters of the old regime and various student led movements against the Derg, the sole survivor being the present incumbent. Rebellious conflicts were also arisen in the other Northern provinces of Gonder and Wollo.¹¹⁵

The management and distribution of land was given to peasant associations (PA), which were formed to cover a minimum area of 800 ha (20 gashas) of land.¹¹⁶ The functions of the peasant associations were mainly to redistribute land, maintain common assets, resolve land dispute conflicts, enable development activities taking place in their areas and implementing villagization programs.¹¹⁷