Madagascar reclaims its colonial land. The gesture outweighs the effect

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A transitional military government has won a symbolic court victory over land left in foreign names since independence. It says more about political legitimacy than about land reform.

MAPUTO — Madagascar’s High Constitutional Court has settled, in three terse paragraphs, a dispute that French colonial-era bureaucracy left unresolved for 66 years. Decision No. 15-HCC/D3, handed down on August 3 and now headed for publication in the Official Gazette, upholds Law No. 2026-007, which automatically transfers to the Malagasy state any land title still registered in a foreign name on June 26 1960, independence day, and never since passed to a Malagasy owner.

On its face this is historical justice served with a six-decade grace period: six decades of administrative inertia converted overnight into a state property title. In practice, the law’s reach is narrower than the official framing suggests, and the timing of its arrival says as much about politics in Antananarivo as about France’s colonial legacy.

What changes, and what does not

The bill, proposed by National Assembly president Siteny Randrianasoloniaiko and passed by parliament on July 1, carves out three exemptions: diplomatic and consular property; land already transferred to Malagasy citizens before 1960; and land held by foreigners who subsequently acquired Malagasy nationality and registered the change with the land registry. Occupants acting in good faith get a path to regularisation; disputes go to civil court.

The more telling detail is what the law leaves untouched. Historian Solofo Randrianja, quoted in the local press, argues the measure does not concern the bulk of land actually farmed or occupied in Madagascar and carries “relatively minor” economic weight. The reason is structural. Most Malagasy land was never formally titled at all.

The land regime installed in 1896 began from a “presumption of state ownership”, land belonged to the state unless proven otherwise, a principle only partially reversed by the 2005 land reform. Formally titled land still registered to foreigners is therefore a narrow, residual pool. The former colonial estate at Ankaditoha, in Antananarivo, now partly occupied by the Collège de France and partly resold to private buyers, captures both the law’s symbolic pull and the practical mess of enforcing it.

The lesson of 2015

Madagascar has tried this before. A 2015 law with a similar aim was struck down by the same court for violating the constitutional guarantee that private property may be expropriated only for public utility and with fair compensation. The flaw was structural: that version routed transferred land to private Malagasy citizens, making it a redistribution scheme rather than a nationalisation. The 2026 version fixes the legal architecture by routing title to the state rather than to third parties, sidestepping the constitutional obstacle that sank its predecessor. This is legal engineering, not a leap in political ambition.

The context the law is designed to obscure

The timing is the detail a strictly legal reading misses. The law advances under a transitional government installed after Andry Rajoelina was removed for “abandonment of office” in October 2025, following Gen Z-led protests over water and electricity shortages and a subsequent military takeover led by Colonel Michaël Randrianirina, now serving as “President of the Refoundation.” The cabinet, headed by prime minister Mamitiana Rajaonarison, is operating under a 24-month roadmap toward a new constitution and elections slated for the last quarter of 2027.

For an unelected government hunting for political capital, a law that hands colonial land back to the “people” is a low-fiscal-cost, high-nationalist-yield dividend, precisely the kind of easy win transitional juntas tend to reach for while harder economic calls wait. The official framing, which casts the measure as “the final step in decolonising land ownership,” serves that purpose efficiently, whatever its actual effect on land distribution turns out to be.

What comes next

Enactment is meant to trigger a national census and inventory of affected parcels, an administrative undertaking that, in any country with a fragmented land registry and decades of dormant disputes, tends to run into years rather than months. For foreign investors holding land-linked assets in Madagascar, the precedent is worth noting: the cut-off criterion is narrow and backdated to 1960, but the mechanism, automatic transfer with no prior individualised process, is the kind of instrument foreign chancelleries and courts tend to scrutinise closely once security of tenure enters the country-risk calculus.

Nothing so far points to the criterion being widened beyond residual colonial-era titles. But the law sets an institutional precedent, nationalisation by lapse of time, upheld by the courts, that Antananarivo may be tempted to revisit if fiscal or political pressure on the transition builds before 2027.