By Luana Paniu

The Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the Special Agriculture and Business Leases (SABL’s) has revealed that there are hundreds more SABL’s beside the 75 cases now currently before them.

According to Chief Commissioner John Numapo about one million hectares of land under the SABL had suddenly ‘popped up’ throughout the five months that the inquiry had been conducting investigations into these matters.

This is as according to briefs, submitted by the counsels and fellow commissioners and he warned that if the Government did not recognise this as part of the 75 SABL’s, then the consequences would be dire.

He said this was because these ‘pop ups’ are ‘operating illegally as fully operational logging projects under the guise of SABL’.

Mr Numapo said in total, these SABL’s were now estimated to affect 1.5 to 2 million people living around the country but said no accurate figure could be given at this stage until all cases have been completed.

“We cannot be sure how many have been affected over and above the initial number given but it’s a large land mass, spread right around the country in a huge number,” he said.

He also stated that the CoI had also engaged an Agriculturalist to test the soil on these sites in which it was discovered that some have land areas cleared for actual planting of Oil Palm while others have seedlings in nursery and others do not fulfill the requirements which are issues that have to be ascertained. 

“Again, that is yet to be established,” he said.

He also stated that some of these cases have the characteristics of logging theft and estimated that the CoI could be looking at a total of 6.4 million hectares.

“In some of these instances, it is obvious they have used SABL as a guise for full fledged logging operations and it defeats that whole purpose of SABL under the Current Law where only 5000 hectares of logs can be cleared while at the same time planting takes place,” he said.

He further stated that this was very suspicious in nature and there was clear evidence that the intention was just for logging, which had become glaringly obvious in many of the cases currently before the inquiry.

“Many of these additional SABL’s also have titles held by foreigners which also defeats the purpose that under the Land Act, it should be with the landowner,” he said.

He said the inquiry discovered that more people had been coming to talk about their SABL’s that were not listed and if a slight amendment was made to the Terms of Reference (TOR) by the Government, then controversial cases could be heard by the CoI.

He also estimates that many more would surface in the remaining five provinces.