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Urban people “buying” a small plot of communal land near to Harare to build a house are running a number of personal risks and are fooling themselves that they are getting a bargain.

For a start, communal land cannot be sold. It is held in trust by the State for those who can show they have land entitlement in the particular community. So what people appear to be buying in legal theory is an allocation of trust land, and that can be reversed almost immediately if it can be shown that the allocation was done corruptly or not in accordance with the rules, both traditional and legal.

The result is that the “buyer” has zero security of tenure and can be moved off the land without compensation.

The second major error is that people think they are getting a bargain. All land, as land, is cheap and a few hundred square metres does not cost much unless the location factor is so great that it adds a lot the final value. What creates the value and creates the bulk of the selling price is the servicing, the roads, the sewers, the water mains and the power grid.

The cheap stands people think they are buying in communal lands have zero services. They are part of a farm. This causes trouble from the beginning, when people need water and would like a power connection. And on small plots sewage disposal becomes a serious problem so that it does not contaminate the water supplies. Latrines and wells close together is considered a very bad idea. This is one reason why, in theory, 4 000 square metres is considered the minimum size housing plot where there is no sewer connection and especially where there is no water supply.

The potential legal, health and planning problems on a small housing stand in communal areas rise dramatically if anyone was daft enough to try and get a subdivision of a resettlement farm. Here the State is in direct control and any attempt to subdivide is likely to bring prompt and heavy response.

Of course State land can be rezoned as residential. This is how quite a few new suburbs are created with a State-owned farm being zoned for housing, properly laid out and planned, the services put in and the land subdivided and then sold. The original land might have been free; the final price then is the cost of the services.

Private land can also be subdivided for housing and frequently is. But again a developer wanting to subdivide a farm has to gain the planning approval and put in the services. Even when you have a plot in an existing urban area that can be split, you are selling a serviced plot on the bit you are not using yourself and the planning authority is already in place.

What is very important is that rural land is not called urban land and sold as such without going through the fairly expensive provision of services and sorting out the town planning requirements. When this is neglected we know exactly what you get, a rural slum if the settlement is small and Epworth if it is larger.

There is need for more serviced land to be made available, and for that matter need for more of this urban land to be used for flats and other higher-density housing so we do not see Harare, Norton and Mazowe becoming a continuous urban area. That is now being worked on but while people can expect State and council schemes to be without profit, they cannot expect them to be subsidised. Private schemes will always have a profit margin.

Some of those moving out into rural areas say they are doing so because they want to live away from a big city and a far more peaceful and restful area. Well this is fine. There are people around the world who work in cities and live in villages or very small towns. But the point is that those villages are recognised, legal land rights and basic services are sorted out and, critically, the residents pay their rates and so the authorities can afford to build the schools and other social amenities they need.

Indeed some of the rural district councils could even work out how these small semi-urban settlements could be laid out, how the tax revenue they generate could be spent, and the sort of contribution they could make.

There is even a strong argument for such settlements far from cities. Many people in Zimbabwe maintain a tie of some sort with the rural community they, or their parents, or their grandparents came from. Some might well want to retire there one day, but possibly with urban amenities like running water. Again some smart planning could allow this, with again the rates able to support the wanted services.

Meanwhile we need to prevent, promptly, the unplanned rural slums. Traditional leaders obviously can, and are, playing their part. Some chiefs are already taking action against the lowest levels of traditional leadership where the corruption seems to be most intense.

But they should not be left to do this themselves. Selling State land, or selling a right to occupy Sate land, is clearly corrupt and so criminal proceedings can take place. Little used at the moment, for some reason, are the provisions in our planning legislation that criminalise a fair swathe of breaches of the planning rules and regulations. Those provisions should be used. They can even be applied against someone who has clear title to the land being subdivided and sold off without the proper planning procedures being first met.

We need to remember that every mistake we make now means that there will be a mess that someone else will have to clean up later. And meanwhile it is the corrupt, the land barons and other extremely unpleasant people who are making the money, almost always in breach of some criminal law.

But things like zero planning, wrongly sited settlements that are almost impossible to service with water pipes and sewers, overcrowded schools because the new people are not paying the rates to extend them or build more, and the rest of the disasters we get when we ignore basic common sense, let alone the law, simply mean huge expenditure down the line.