Buying land? Please, go searching in the rainy season

About four years ago, a friend bought a piece of land, finally achieving a long-held dream of becoming a landowner.

She was so excited, she later on invited a couple of us to visit her investment and toast to her achievement and the good fortune it would bring her.

At first glance, the land, located in the Gikambura area somewhere in Kiambu County, seemed a worthwhile investment. The other pieces of land surrounding it were a spectacular green when we visited, thanks to young maize plants, beans and peas, and healthy-looking sukuma wiki, not to mention avocado trees, the branches hanging low with fruit.

While this friend had no intention of putting up a house and settling down here, she envisioned herself making money on the side by planting and selling a wide range of vegetables and grains as she waited for the value of the land to appreciate, and thereafter sell it for a handsome profit. We were happy for her.

Unknown to her, however, the land she had taken a bank loan to buy was located in an area prone to flooding.

Not only that, her piece of land was furthest down the line from the somewhat steep incline, therefore, whenever it rained, all the water uphill would flow downhill and camp on her parcel of land.

But she had no way of knowing this because she had no experience in land buying, and also went looking during the dry season. If ever there was an unwise investment, this was it.

She only found out the blunder she had made when she went to check on the progress of the crops, having bought seedlings a month before and paid a number of locals to till the land and plant maize, beans and peas.

It was at the beginning of April, and it had been raining cats and dogs, therefore, she looked forward to her first bountiful harvest. Only that what she found was a mini lake. A mini lake with wild ducks floating around serenely.

There were no crops to talk of, and the entire piece of land, including the path leading to it, had been swallowed up by flood water. Uphill, the other pieces of land were a glistening green, ripe with an assortment of young crops. It was surreal.

To say that my friend was devastated would be an understatement. Still clinging to hope, she knocked on the door of one of the nearby homes and asked, with trepidation, whether the flooding was a common occurrence.

‘Yes’, she was told, the area was generally marshland, and had always been, and that where her piece of land stood was especially affected. “You didn’t know that?” the elderly man who answered the door asked her, sounding shocked that this fact had eluded her.

As you read this, my friend is servicing a loan for a piece of land that is useless. In an effort to salvage her investment, she bought several lorries full of soil, which were dumped in her parcel of land. She hoped that this would raise the level of the land and prevent it from getting submerged, but this ended up being money down the drain, because the mounds of soil were swallowed up by the rainwater.

My distraught friend, who is keen to recoup her money now has only one option – to sell the land to an unsuspecting buyer. Being a conscientious person, the very thought has been giving her sleepless nights, but what is she to do? She was ‘conned’ too, wasn’t she?

The moral of the story here, is never to buy land during the dry season, because chances are that you might end up with a worthless investment. One with a title yes, but one that you cannot farm on, or build on.

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