Ministry, judges on the spot over 5,000 land cases

The National Land Commission inherited 5,000 unresolved cases from the Lands ministry, its chairman, Dr Muhammad Swazuri, said on Monday.

To resolve some of the cases, which Dr Swazuri said require extensive investigation, the commission has set up a team to deal with historical land injustices.

“Disputes over boundaries remain unresolved and there are also cases where land did not reach the intended beneficiaries,” Dr Swazuri told the Nation shortly after launching the commission’s strategic plan for 2013 to 2018 at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre in Nairobi.

The plan was developed with the support of the Ministry of Devolution and National Planning, which is under Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru. However, the commission falls under the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Planning, which falls under the docket of Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu.

In recent months, Dr Swazuri and Mrs Ngilu have been locked in a supremacy contest.

Last month, Mrs Ngilu closed Ardhi House, the headquarters of the Lands ministry, for ten days to clean up the lands registry. Dr Swazuri opposed the move and went to court seeking to reverse the minister’s decision.

Speed up transactions
However, the dispute was resolved when President Kenyatta intervened and Dr Swazuri withdrew his case.

Dr Swazuri said yesterday that the commission had hired secretaries to work in counties in its drive to speed up land transactions under devolved governments.

The commission’s chief executive, Mr Tom Aziz, said the commission was in the process of setting up county land management boards whose main responsibility will be to offer services to citizens besides carrying out awareness campaigns on land matters.

Speaking at a separate meeting in Nairobi, Chief Justice Willy Mutunga accused the Executive of stifling land reforms leading to the constant conflicts between it, Parliament and the Judiciary.

“Land remains the Achilles heel of the Judiciary as it seeks to implement fundamental and radical changes which were the root of transformation or revolution organised around the implementation of the Constitution,” Dr Mutunga told an international conference on the Constitution.

Among the challenges that the courts faced, he said, was the government’s disregard for court orders which he said had made the work of judges difficult.

And while addressing the KICC meeting, Dr Swazuri said the land commission had already launched investigations into the illegal issuance of title deeds and cases of double allocation of land in settlement schemes. These are the high potential agriculture areas known as “the white highlands” during the colonail era. Many of these schemes are in the Rift Valley and Central Kenya regions.

Dr Swazuri admitted that resolving disputes in the schemes was one of the most difficulty tasks that the commission was facing because even courts have failed to resolve most of the disputes there.

In a related development, Mrs Ngilu Monday said that her ministry will give out five million new title deeds in two years.

She said her ministry targets to process 10 million title deeds by 2017 and so far 1.4 million have been processed since the beginning of this year from the computerised centre at the Survey of Kenya offices on Thika Road, Nairobi. She said 120 officers have been posted at the centre to speed up the process.

Mrs Ngilu, who had earlier made a surprise visit to the Thika land office in Kiambu County said it was regrettable that only about three million title deeds had been issued since independence.

“We are optimistic that under the new system, the numerous cases of land fraud will be eliminated but this requires a concerted effort by government agencies including the police and the law courts,” she said.

A senior cartographer, Ms Jacqueline Adhiambo, said the department was producing 200 to 300 title deeds every two days through the new processing system that uses satellite imaging.

Speaking in Thika Mrs Ngilu said her ministry will close land registries in various counties including Kiambu, Murang’a and Nakuru where there have been reports of illegal transactions.

“After cleaning up the Nairobi land registry, we are moving out to other registries so as to put an end to the mess that has been in our land offices for years,” she said and asked the public to be patient and allow an audit team to streamline operations in land offices.

She blamed the land fraud cases on some land buying companies which were issuing documents to various plot owners.

“The question of land buying companies issuing multiple papers for the same parcel has been a big headache and has led to confusion and endless land cases,” she said.

Additional reporting by John Njagi