Just recetly, National Land Commission played a role in securing Deputy President William Ruto’s Weston Hotel by giving recommendations that it was standing on the public land, but Ruto should instead pay compensations rather than being demolished. Do you think this was the best they could do?
Well, as the seven-year term of the current NLC comes to an end on February 19, a commissioner has returned a stinging verdict on its performance.
“We must apologise to Kenyans for not standing up to stop some things that should never have been done in the name of the NLC,” commissioner Abdukadir Khalif said in an interview with a local daily.
The surveyor said the team also owes Kenyans an apology for unmet expectations and for which there was no valid reason, adding that the next commission should get its priorities right to serve Wanjiku, and avoid the mistakes of his team.
Khalif regrets that the NLC was distracted and ultimately failed to achieve its goal to make land transactions simple and efficient with service centres close to citizens.
“Top among these was to stop punishing Wanjiku with tedious and costly journeys to Nairobi for opaque land transactions, and instead devolve functions and processes to the counties. We failed. All key processes are still centralised in Nairobi,” he said.
The policy to devolve land administration and management processes to the counties, to ease the burden, costs and time taken in searches, authentication and approval of documents anticipated to come with unbundling the central registry to county centres was stalled, and remains as it was before the NLC was set up.
Rampant cases of missing files, multiple registration of parcels of land, an opaque regulations regime, and yet-to-be-settled jurisdictional disputes between the NLC and the ministry are still rife.
This has left citizens, investors and players in the land sector including banks and professionals in a permanent state of abeyance in the absence of clarity about who between the commission and the ministry was the final authority on some key processes like extension and renewal of expired lease titles.