• Stakeholders need to know the land status in Zambia.
• Government is busy giving out land, yet people don’t know where the country is in terms of statistics of land.
• That is an urgent matter which government needs to expedite.

Zambia Land Alliance (ZLA) has reaffirmed calls for government to expedite National Land Audit.
Speaking in an interview with Money FM News, Alliance Executive Director Patrick Musole said stakeholders need to know the land status in Zambia because government has been converting customary land to state tenure and yet statistics are not known.
Mr. Musole stated that even if the European Union (EU) has come on board to support the process, stakeholders have not seen much movement in that direction despite being in the second quarter of the year.
“We have been singing about the land audit because government is busy giving out land, busy converting customary land to state land and yet we don’t know where we are in terms of statistics of how much customary land we have and how much state land we have left and you are making decisions. So basically, you are making decisions in the dark and so that is an urgent matter which government needs to expedite.”
“We know for a fact that the EU has come on board to help with the process but we are concerned that we are now in the second quarter of the year and we have not seen much movement in that direction. So we would like to urge government to expedite the process of the National Land Audit. We need to know what are the statistics of land status in Zambia so that’s quite urgent and we would like to appeal to government to expedite that process,” Mr. Musole said.
Government is conducting a National Land Audit in order to ascertain the quantity of land currently held under the State and Customary tenure.
Zambia has a surface area of approximately 752,614 square kilometres with about 94% of its land under the customary land system and administration, while 8% of both state and customary land is reserved for national parks and about 9% for forests.