**5.2 Illiteracy and "blind" loyalty to traditional leaders and local government officials**

The Cubo community's "blind" loyalty to traditional leadership and local government officials may have contributed to its lack of effort to challenge the alienation of its land by ProCana. The community, through its Associação could easily have used the extant land law to challenge the grabbing of its land, but it has not done so, and this was compounded by a lack of funds to hire a lawyer to challenge the state in the court of law. Illiteracy, which is prevalent among the community members, may have contributed to a lack of fully understanding of the statutes of the land law. This is being aggravated by the lack of effective civil society's support in Mozambique to assist communities like Cubo to take legal recourse against the government's violation of its land law.

#### **5.3 Susceptible communal tenure security**

The sources of land tenure insecurity in Mozambique are more complex than generally acknowledged. The statutory mechanisms for securing land tenure rights are insufficiently effective to protect the full range of land interests in modern and globalized economic circumstances. Those with the least status, knowledge, or means, such as local communities are least well served. The State itself is a source of insecurity due to the way it easily transfers communal land tenure rights to the private sector—a process that appears to have strong economic incentives for political elites and central bureaucracies to consolidate their control over natural resources at the expense of local communities who are custodial owners of these resources.

#### **5.4 Lack of political will in support of CBNRM programs**

CBNRM programs are greatly constrained by a lack of political will to enforce the extant enabling policies and legislation, regardless of international NGOs and donor support. Attempts to set up CBNRM projects against the backdrop of legislation, such as Mozambique's land law, that is not being effectively enforced, wastes donor funds, derails the morale of the supporting NGOs, and erodes the community's capital assets—notably the natural capital (e.g., land & its associated stocks of natural resources and environmental services); social capital (natural resources governance associations, norms, trust and disposition to work for a common good for biodiversity conservation); and loss of potential by the communities to diversify their income generation from conservation enterprises and the related spinoff businesses. International NGOs spearheading CBNRM efforts are poorly positioned, in a political sense, to address the problem of ineffective enforcement of the land law statutes.
