Why digitising land records is a challenge in Kenya

A few months ago, a confident Minister of Lands Charity Ngilu shut down the lands registry in Nairobi for purposes of reorganising and digitising lands records.

She promised to reopen it in ten days with a revamped, efficient lands registry, and promised digitisation of land records would be completed in three years.

The office did reopen after ten days, and I have to disclose that I have not had a chance to visit and see the extent of the digitisation effort. However, a quick search on the Ministry of Lands website or that of the National Land Commission does not yield any evidence of the existence of digitised lands records so far.

Instead it shows the power play between these two bodies that has led to the Supreme Court demanding that they sit down, talk and decide who is in charge of what, in as far as land management in the country is concerned. But irrespective of who is in charge, Kenyans needs the long-awaited Lands Information System.

ONE QUERY, MULTIPLE OFFICES

This is a standard system based on a Geographic Information System (GIS) that will allow digitised lands records to be captured, stored, manipulated and queried electronically.

The ongoing controversial saga surrounding the ownership of both the Karen and the Lamu land would not be dragging and stalling if a GIS system existed to serve Kenyan needs.

In this Information Age, Kenyans wishing to do a search on a prospective piece of land or property should be able to do so at the touch of a button, without having to be taken through multiple visits and loops across different national and county government offices.

SMS LAND QUERIES

The technology for this has been around over the last fifteen years, and indeed the Ministry of lands has been a attempting to implement it over this period of time.

Yet it is not rocket science. In fact, the technology is actually in use by other government agencies as can be seen here on the Government Open Data Portal.

The digital map shows detailed location, ownership, and quality of water resources in Kajiado and several other counties.

Furthermore, mobile operators would be more than willing to provide an SMS platform that can query the Land Information System the same way we query our water and electricity utilities.

EMOTIONS OVER LAND

So why can't we have this system in place? Clearly technology is not the issue; perhaps political will or lack thereof is the problem.

This is further compounded by Kenyans' peculiar land habits which find us emotionally, culturally and economically tied to land.

We are emotional with land to the point of dangerously fighting at genocidal levels over it.

We are culturally attached to it because most of us believe we have to be buried where our great-great-grandfathers were buried, while other cultures simply turn you into ash and spread you across the earth.

SPECULATION PAYS

Finally, we have got our economics of land wrong by opting to play the speculating, rather than the development, game with it.

The new constitution has tried to address this by proposing a limit to the size of land owned by individuals and taxing idle land, but the relevant land legislation has shied away from supporting this principle.

Perhaps it is only in Kenya where you will frequently find a plot to be more expensive than the house or building that will eventually stand on it. 

It is this twisted sense of land economics that has seen our political class grab and continue to grab huge parcels of public land with a view to cashing in on it when the time to campaign arrives.

Now, these very politicians are the ones to decide if and when to digitise and make land records available electronically. Why should they, when such a system will clearly inform the citizenry on which land is public and possibly who has grabbed it or is trying to resell it?

THE LAND RECORDS SONG

Fifteen years ago, in the year 2000, the “Digitise Land Records” song began to be sung in earnest within the Kanu regime.

The Narc regime of 2002 picked up the song and sang it louder. But five years later there was little progress, and the Coalition government of 2008 added new tunes to this song without actually implementing it.

Today, our very own digital government has revamped the choir and remixed the song “Digitise Land Records”.

It remains to be seen if implementation will finally happen, but please do not hold your breath — unless of course you have an extra pair of lungs.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter:@jwalu