The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  But what value will this land have? Mayom county is hundreds of miles from anywhere, on a roadless savannah plain where land disputes are at the heart of many lethal conflicts. In early 2010, the Matips’ Nuer people from Mayom attacked cattle camps in nearby Kock county inhabited by their rivals for supremacy in the new nation, the Dinka. Reportedly, they killed more than a hundred people, and there were reprisals. Battles continued in Mayom through 2011. A rebel group opposed to Juba rule was based there.

  There is a further problem with Heilberg’s mega–land deal. Nobody has yet come up with any convincing evidence that the land was ever legally Matip’s to lease. Unity province’s governor told David Deng, a researcher from New York University on leave at the South Sudan Law Society, that it was not Matip’s land. Moreover, the governor said he had never heard of Jarch, even though it was supposedly the largest landowner in his province. He regarded any deal as without legal validity.

  Now the governor, Taban Deng Gai, is a Dinka. And his personal forces clashed with those of General Matip in 2009. But, according to David Deng, the local commissioner of Mayom county at the time the land deal was struck claims to be equally in the dark. So do the people living on the land in question. There might be a legal document somewhere. But even so, the chairman of the Southern Sudan Land Commission, Robert Lado, told Reuters in 2009 that “our land is communal. An individual can only sell it when there is consensus among members of that community.” The country’s new Land Act says that “customary land rights . . . shall have equal force and effect in law with freehold or leasehold rights.”

  Deng concludes that “despite the media attention devoted to this investment, there is little evidence that the lease between Heilberg and Matip is anything more than an agreement between two companies, neither of which appears to be the legal owner of the land.” But in the badlands of Mayom county, the force of the general may matter more than the niceties of law. That looks like Heilberg’s view. He told Fortune magazine in 2009: “As long as General Matip is alive, my contract is good.” Probably the outcome of the continuing tribal dispute—which if anything has been inflamed by the end of the civil war—will determine whether Heilberg gets his hands on the land he claims.

  Heilberg is the land grabbers’ land grabber. He operates in a universe where, if you believe his own rhetoric, law comes from the barrel of a gun. He told Rolling Stone magazine: “This is Africa. The whole place is like one big mafia—and I’m like a mafia head.” He believes we live in a post-state world, the nightmare of mayhem encapsulated by Robert Kaplan in his famous essay, The Coming Anarchy. “When food becomes scarce, the investor needs a weak state that does not force him to abide by any rules,” says Heilberg. He obviously likes this kind of stuff. But the reality doesn’t seem so different. Rolling Stone dubbed him the “capitalist of chaos.”

  The capitalist of chaos has high-profile friends in the United States. His vice chairman and guide through African politics has been Joseph C. Wilson, a former Clinton ambassador in six African countries who fell out with the CIA after denouncing the agency’s claim that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from Niger. Other members of the Jarch board have included Gwyneth Todd, another Pentagon adviser on the region in the Clinton days; Larry Johnson, an ex–CIA operative and prolific blogger (at his site NoQuarterUSA) on security and his dislike of Barack Obama; and J. Peter Pham, a prominent neoconservative commentator on global issues, who pronounced at the birth of South Sudan that it was “already on the brink of failure.”

  Heilberg believes that “we are seeing the death knell of the financial instrument—of the paper world. We’re going to see the rise of the commodity.” But which commodity is he really after? He talks now of introducing mechanized prairie-style agriculture to his piece of South Sudan, perhaps bringing in Israeli technocrats. But as recently as 2008, Jarch described plans to “lift the light sweet crude . . . once South Sudan secedes from Khartoum.” Some say that remains his real aim. Certainly there is no sign of him actually breaking the ground in Mayom, let alone doing any farming.

  I did try to learn more, but his office told me that “too many writers and editors use their creative licenses with a bit of excess,” so Heilberg was no longer talking to them. That’s a shame. Because I still want to ask him who he has in mind when he talks about “YOUR land” and “YOUR natural resources”?

  For many of us with a smattering of geography, the name Sudan conjures up a picture of an arid land, with searing heat, endless sand dunes, drought, and occasional famine. Much of the north of Sudan is like that. But the south—which became a state in 2011 when the black Christians and animists of the south formally seceded from the Arab Muslims of the north—is different, geographically as well as culturally and ethnically. It is washed by myriad tributaries of the White Nile, many of them running out of the highlands of Ethiopia. Along the main stream of the Nile lies the Sudd, one of the world’s last great untamed wetlands. Flying over South Sudan reveals a huge area of rich, well-watered pasture. It is rather like the Ethiopian lowland province of Gambella, which it borders.

  Given its lushness, South Sudan is also surprisingly empty. It is the size of France but has only an eighth as many people. They are mostly exceedingly poor. Only a quarter of the adult population is literate. Grabbing land in South Sudan must look to some as easy as stealing candy from a baby. Certainly, its government has been handing out long leases on prodigious amounts of land to people with dubious track records, and no obvious agricultural pedigree. A study by the NGO Norwegian People’s Aid concluded that at independence, it had already parceled out to foreign investors 14 million acres, or 9 percent of the new state. A quarter of the country’s “green belt” around the capital, Juba, which has the richest soils and best rains, has been allocated.

  Almost as mysterious as the Jarch cowboys are two white Western men in their seventies, Leonard Henry Thatcher and Howard Eugene Douglas. They are respectively the chairman of Nile Trading and Development and the managing director of its affiliate, Kinyeti Development, named after South Sudan’s highest mountain, on the border with Uganda. Both companies are based in Texas. Douglas was an “ambassador at large” and coordinator of refugee affairs for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, a time when Sudan was producing plenty of refugees. Thatcher is a British investment banker, who claims “special familiarity and contacts in southern Sudan.” In 2008, Thatcher negotiated a forty-nine-year lease on 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) in the state of Central Equatoria. Since he became sick, his friend Douglas has taken over trying to turn the deal into some kind of reality on the ground.

  Why do these two men want this huge tract of land, more than twice the size of Rhode Island? Well, it is strategically placed. Central Equatoria is in South Sudan’s prized green belt. Thatcher told the governor there that he would grow oil palm, hardwood trees, and the biofuel jatropha. Douglas says both men also share a philanthropic belief that South Sudan can only become a free, stable, and uncorrupt nation by creating a property-owning middle class of “yeoman farmers.” He says that is his real purpose, and he is angry that members of the South Sudanese diaspora in the United States, and their friends among NGOs, ascribe venal motives to their investment. There is, if anything, even more confusion about what land Douglas and Thatcher might actually have a real claim to than there is with Heilberg in the oilfields of Mayom county. For a start, the agreement says the 600,000 hectares (about 1.5 million acres) to which they have a lease is all in the county of Lainya. That’s difficult. Lainya covers only 340,000 hectares in total. When I asked Douglas about this, he said it was a technicality that could be resolved. “The size of the land leased to us came from the Sudanese side. It wasn’t a scientific figure, not well defined. For me it’s not consequential whether it is really 600,000 hectares or 200,000 hectares. We can renegotiate if necessary.” Douglas says the whole contract is “subject to survey,” and the necessary aerial surveys and mapping have n
ot yet been done.

  This is weird. To whom exactly were the Sudanese people handing over land without even a map to say what land it was? And what did the ninety thousand people of Lainya think about losing their entire county to a couple of Western gray-hairs? The deal was done, Douglas says, with the Mukaya Payam Cooperative. But NGOs who have investigated the deal claim the cooperative is fictitious, and that its three signatories of the contract were Scopas Loduo, the chief of Mukaya, a subcounty covering about a sixth of Lainya, and two members of his family.

  I put it to Douglas that he may have done a deal with charlatans. He accepted that it was not clear what rights these three, or any cooperative, had over the land. There was a meeting, he said, at which many people were present. “We couldn’t demand to know if we had the right chiefs. It was always presented to us that they had sufficient authority. Nobody in the two and a half years since the signing ever raised this issue to us, or called the bona fides of the Mukaya Payam into question—not the county commissioner, not the police, not the generals and not the signatories themselves.”

  This, surely, shows a lack of what lawyers would call “due diligence” on the part of Thatcher and Douglas. There are four traditional chiefs in Lainya county, all of whom should have signed to make the deal in any way valid.

  Confusion was increased when, in a BBC interview broadcast in July 2011, chief Scopas claimed he too had been duped. He said provincial officials “came and said sign here. I signed. But I didn’t know what it said.” He said it was only afterwards that he was told he had signed a forty-nine-year lease on his community’s land. “I was deceived.” Douglas is bemused by the chief’s response. “The chief met us several times. I don’t understand his concerns.”

  Maybe money played a part in the confusion. Douglas says no cash has yet changed hands, apart from fees for registering the land deal. But local officials say they expect Nile Trading eventually to pay the community up to a million dollars as compensation for taking the land. The Mukaya Payam Cooperative will take a share of any profits. Those are substantial incentives. Douglas is adamant that, once business gets going, he will set up a proper body to administer funds and ensure the communities are paid. But many other people may believe they can prosper along the way.

  I spoke to Douglas in late 2011, shortly after an angry public meeting in Mukaya, attended by local parliamentarians, chiefs, and officials, had rejected the lease, saying it had been done by “influential natives” but “in the absence of the community.” It was unclear whether they were opposed in principle, or whether they wanted a share of the anticipated rewards. Douglas was due to return to South Sudan to try and save the deal. But he feared for his safety in “an increasingly hostile environment. You can’t guard against walk-up shootings in Africa.” He blamed irresponsible NGOs for “stirring up trouble in a highly charged tribal environment,” inciting greed and envy. If they persist, he said, Thatcher’s financial backers won’t proceed, and nobody will get anything.

  Equally, one might argue that the arrival of rich Westerners asking to buy up huge chunks of communal land, in a newly independent country with no clear land laws, was itself “stirring up trouble.” This clash of cultures seems unlikely to end well.

  A further odd aspect of the deal is that the Nile Trading concession appears to overlap two other concessions in Lainya county. The largest, covering 125,000 acres in Lainya and neighboring Yei county, is owned by Central Equatoria Teak, a plantation company specializing in the prized hardwood that has grown in the region since the 1940s. Central Equatoria Teak was set up as a joint venture of the British government’s Department for International Development, through its commercial investment arm, the CDC Group, and Finland’s Finnfund. It signed a lease in 2008 for 125,000 acres of natural forest in the two counties.

  Thus between them, Nile Trading and Central Equatoria claim concessions covering as much as 1.6 million acres in Lainya—a county of just 840,000 acres. When I asked CDC about this, its spokesman admitted that Central Equatoria Teak’s agreement with the government of South Sudan contained “no maps or plans” of the concession area. As with Nile Trading, no survey had actually been done yet. “The area of natural forest to be included within the 50,000 hectares [125,000 acres] would be selected at a later date,” the spokesman said. Strange deals, indeed.

  All the land deals I investigated in South Sudan became tantalizing mysteries. Who had sold what to whom was rarely clear. Here is a third mystery, again involving huge areas of the new country. An organization from Abu Dhabi called Al Ain National Wildlife has bought a thirty-year concession to conduct high-roller tourism in Boma National Park, which is one of Africa’s largest and least spoilt parks, an ecological gem. It covers 5.7 million acres, an area the size of New Hampshire, on the border with Ethiopia.

  Boma was largely forgotten by environmentalists during Sudan’s long civil war. But they woke up to its worth in 2007, when the New York–based Wildlife Conservation Society conducted an aerial survey. It reported that Boma’s woodlands, swamps, and grasslands were home to some of Africa’s largest herds of giraffes, elephants, and buffalo. It was, moreover, a hub of wildlife migration, from which white-eared kob and Nile lechwe traveled into Gambella in Ethiopia, and other animals went west into the vast Sudd wetland on the Nile.

  Naturally, South Sudan is interested in both conserving this unique resource and exploiting its economic potential. Al Ain National Wildlife offered both. The 2009 deal with the provisional South Sudan ministry of wildlife gave the company control of most of the park. Before the year was out, the company was acting like it owned the place, flying in and out without restriction aboard planes registered in the United Arab Emirates, building a resort camp, and laying a network of roads, apparently without the approval of the government.

  So far, with security in South Sudan still dodgy at best, there are no tourists. But the big mystery is who owns Al Ain National Wildlife. I asked a number of conservationists, administrators, lawyers, and others in both South Sudan and Abu Dhabi. Nobody admitted to knowing. The Al Ain Wildlife Park and Resort outside Abu Dhabi, which is owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family, denies any link. “There are very wealthy people behind it, but the truth is complex” was the nearest I got. The only known official is the chairman, Falah al Ahbabi, a civil servant who is also the general manager of the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council. His day job is to “green” the city, a centerpiece of which is the expansion of the existing wildlife park into a 2,200-acre complex with thousands more animals and “themed African, Arabian and Asian safari encampments.” There are those who fear—on the basis of what has happened at other wildlife reserves elsewhere in Africa operated by mysterious people from the Gulf emirates—that some of Boma’s animals may end up in the new wildlife park. Frankly, I share those fears. I think Al Ain National Wildlife should break cover and tell us its plans.

  Other land investors in South Sudan include a Canadian charity that is growing vegetables on a former government plantation outside Juba, and “teaching the Sudanese how to plant, grow and harvest larger crops to feed their families.” South African brewing conglomerate SAB Miller, the world’s second-biggest brewer, wants to help two thousand smallholders grow cassava to brew its popular White Bull lager in Juba. And a Norwegian forestry company, Green Resources, has plans to plant teak forests on 440,000 acres of Central Equatoria.

  But potentially the biggest player here is Egypt. An Egyptian private equity firm, Citadel Capital, one of Egypt’s most high-profile land investors, has won 250,000 acres of farmland in Unity province near the capital Bentiu. If the country stabilizes, this will be prime agricultural real estate on the Nile, with full rights to abstract water and a river port to send the crops downstream to Egypt. Citadel plans to grow sugar, corn, sorghum, and vegetables. Its local boss, Australian Peter Schuurs, told the Financial Times he anticipated returns of 40–50 percent: “The name of the game is to get there first a
nd to do it first.”

  The scheme forms part of an Egyptian strategy to secure food supplies by accessing well-irrigated land in neighboring countries. But Egypt also wants South Sudan’s help in delivering more water down the Nile to Egypt itself. The idea is to revive an engineering megaproject to dig a giant canal that would allow the Nile to bypass the giant Sudd swamp in South Sudan. The waters of the Nile spend almost a year meandering through this wetland. During that time, roughly half the water evaporates. The Egyptians reckon that, by bypassing the swamp, the river could deliver an extra 4 million acre-feet of water down to Egypt.

  But the Sudd wetland is one of the wildlife gems of Africa. It is the world’s second-largest swamp. Some years it is as big as Alabama. Its myriad channels contain an ever-shifting maze of papyrus islands, some thick enough to carry herds of elephants and hippos. It has the world’s largest wild crocodile population. White-eared kob migrate from here to Gambella. It is one of Africa’s top bird sanctuaries. The canal would kill it, and most of its wildlife. It would be an environmental disaster. It would also wreck Dinka pastures.

  The canal is no engineers’ pipe dream. It was two-thirds completed in the 1980s. Work was abandoned only after an armed raid by one of the founders of the South Sudan independence movement, U.S.-educated John Garang—who had written a doctoral thesis on the swamp. The giant machine, known as the “bucketwheel,” that was carrying out the excavation is still there, a little rusted but ready to resume work. Garang, who died in an air accident in 2005, was vehemently opposed to the canal because he said it would steal South Sudan’s water. But now that the war is over, the new country’s government may have its price for allowing Egypt to grab its water.