New plan to shut out cartels at Lands offices

• Permanent secretary Dorothy Angote says an automation project that will tame powerful, well connected operatives will be ready by May.

A significant stage of the Sh3.8-billion automation project at the Ministry of Lands will be marked in May when the new information management system is up and running, the Saturday Nation has learnt.

It is believed that the system, once operational, will transform service delivery in land transactions.

The automation is touted as the surest way to fight cartels at the ministry, which are robbing the government of millions of shillings, according to permanent secretary Dorothy Angote.

But even with the minimal reforms carried out so far, the ministry’s revenue collection has increased from Sh32 million a day countrywide to Sh32 million a day only at the head office.

The ministry intends to triple this figure.

“Since July, last year, the ministry has collected Sh4.4 billion as at last Friday, March, 5,” says Ms Angote.

“Our major concern, however, is the issue of cartels,” says the PS who, in the course of her work, has had to contend with two common phrases — “if you don’t mind” and “missing files”.

Her experience with several people who, after she responds to their greetings and an exchange of pleasantries, swiftly follow by inquiries about a file missing here and there.

It has happened to her in church as well as at supermarkets, hotels and restaurants and in the streets. In the same way, most calls to her office are centred on that one theme — “missing files”.

She got fed up so much that, on March 1, this year, she decided to do what is least expected of her, physically look for those files.

This led to a search at the Lands offices, an exercise that saw the ministry’s operations come to a near-standstill.

“I had to move from office to office, physically looking for the files,” she recalls. “To my shock, I found thousands of them, with some having 1995 as the year the last correspondence was filed.”

Thousands more have since been returned to the ministry’s registry. A quick perusal of the files by the Saturday Nation showed that most of them have no pending action.

“We are still profiling the files and the officers concerned are to explain what they were doing with them,” says the PS. “The whole exercise is quite shocking.”

She at first could not understand it all, and she had to sit down with the ministry’s senior officers for her to get to the bottom of the matter.