Orengo: The Government won’t buy illegally acquired land to settle the IDPs

The Government will not buy grabbed land to resettle the internally displaced people.

Lands minister James Orengo has directed his permanent secretary, Ms Dorothy Angote, to ensure no land listed in the Ndung’u report is bought, arguing that it has been grabbed from the public.

Addressing a workshop in Nairobi on Thursday, Mr Orengo noted the Government was buying some of the controversial land to resettle IDPs.

He was responding to a question from the coordinator of the Kenya Land Alliance, Mr Lumumba Odenda, who had wanted to know why some of the land mentioned in the Ndung’u report as irregularly allocated, was being bought again by the Government.

He gave an example of a piece owned by former Defence minister Njenga Karume which, he noted, the Government was buying.

The land, the report said, was irregularly allocated and is in Molo. It was initially owned by Agriculture Development Corporation, it added.

This, Mr Odenda said, is contrary to recommendations by the Ndung’u commission, which investigated land grabbing and allocations and recommended that it be repossessed without compensation.

Mr Orengo did not refute the claims, but said that if the grabbed land had been developed, the Government has no mechanism of repossessing it.

The only time it can be repossessed is when it is idle. He said the Government was still determined to take back without compensation all grabbed public land.

The Government not buy any land which is the subject of investigations by the Kenya Anti Corruption Commission (KACC), he pointed out.

“The Government shall also not buy land which is the subject of a court case, however suitable that land may be,” he said.

The Government is currently shopping for 20,000 acres on which to resettle the families uprooted from their homes during the post-poll violence.

Mr Orengo said that the government had identified 8,000 acres of arable land to resettle some of the IDPs, and needed an extra 12,00 to complete the exercise.

He explained that he issued the memo on land buying to the PS on Wednesday. “You can see that this memo preceded yesterday’s function, in which I was purported to have made this statement,” he added.

Mr Orengo also ruled out compensation for land taken back, arguing that it had been acquired unlawfully.

“We are developing a legal mechanism to repossess such land in an expeditious manner because our experience has shown that court cases involving land take six to seven years,” he said.

He also announced that his ministry was developing a Land Amendment Act that would set up a tribunal to ensure land irregularly acquired is repossessed very quickly.

The ministry has already cancelled title deeds acquired corruptly, while some people who have acquired land by irregular means have also started surrendering it to the Government, he pointed out.

Mr Orengo clarified that only arable land would be bought. The Government would not buy land from people who received it from the Government and failed to develop it.

“We are saying that if you were given land by the Government, say 10 years ago, but you have not done anything on it and you now want to sell it to the Government at the prevailing market rates, we will not buy it because we will not get the value for the money,” he said.