[Source: Business Daily, by Sam Kiplagat]
For close to two months now, the national land registries have remained shut, effectively freezing multibillion-shilling transactions amid rising disquiet by interest groups.
Land Cabinet Secretary (CS) Farida Karoney announced that in compliance with the Presidential directive on the management and mitigation of Covid-19, the ministry would scale down its operations from March 17.
But a few days before the directive, the ministry had published a notice intending to close registries at Ardhi House for purposes of conducting an audit. The move forced the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) to rush to court, seeking orders to compel the CS to rescind the decision.
Through lawyer Duncan Anzala, LSK said it was concerned that the closure will affect transactions worth millions of shillings.
The lawyers’ umbrella body argued that the operations at the Nairobi district and central registries would be stifled for the three-week period, the registries will remain closed.
While the closure on March 17 was necessary as the government announced measures to stop the spread of the pandemic and to protect employees, it was not the first time, having been a regular phenomenon for the last seven years.
Former Land CS Charity Ngilu, now Kitui County Governor, tried during her tenure and there was an uproar although many Kenyans agree that the registries had been plagued by corruption including hiding of files for gain, interference with information and fraudulent creation of multiple records for same parcels of land.
The digitisation of land records in Nairobi registry started in 2014. The goal was to have all the records stored in a document management system (DMS). This would facilitate electronic document archival, access and retrieval in a secure, verifiable, transparent and timely manner, according to the ministry.
Since then a number of officials from the Lands office have been charged with either bribery, issuing fake title deeds or aiding and abetting fraud.
Other than the audit, the ministry intends to digitise its records to weed out double allocations of land, overlaps, among other ills that have plagued the registry, at the click of the bottom.
Further, lawyers faulted the move stating that there should have been public participation before the CS published the notice in the local dailies.
In documents filed in court, lawyers alleged that they petitioned the National Assembly on January 21 to investigate the massive failure of land management system.
[Full article: Business Daily, by Sam Kiplagat]
