The deed and the ground
A certificate of title records a claim. It does not, on its own, tell you who is standing on the land.
I am a Zambian lawyer working in property, estates and governance. This is where I write about how those systems actually co-exist — and what it takes to build something that outlasts you.
Recent writing
A certificate of title records a claim. It does not, on its own, tell you who is standing on the land.
The questions worth asking before money moves, and why the sequence matters more than the checklist.
Dying without a will does not mean your estate goes nowhere. It means someone else decides, using rules you did not choose.
What I am working on
Most of what appears here sits somewhere among land governance, property and conveyancing and estates and succession — the practical end, where transactions either complete or quietly fail.
Behind those sit the slower questions: corporate governance, and how authority and records decide whether an institution survives its founder; law and development, and who the system reaches; and legacy planning, which is really all of the above, arranged deliberately rather than left to chance.
About
Elsa Mwalilino is a Zambian estates and real estate attorney, researcher and writer, and a Senior Associate at Kaumbu Mwondela Legal Practitioners, where she leads the Conveyancing and Company Secretarial departments.
She holds an LLB and an MSc in Human Rights, Governance and Development from the University of Zambia. Her practice supplied the transactions; her research took her into the systems behind them.
The Legacy Circle
A small group of readers who receive new essays, commentary and research as they are published — and who are thinking about the same questions. Occasional, never noisy.
Not yet connected — set SUBSCRIBE_ACTION in build.py to make this live.