MWATHANE: Lands ministry must do more to improve services to people this year

PHOTO | EMMA NZIOKA Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu when she appeared before the Parliamentary Committee on Lands on September 3, 2013.  NATION MEDIA GROUP

In Summary

• Service consumers and stakeholders were magnanimous in patience, perhaps to give the new teams time to settle down.
• The Cabinet Secretary and her team, and the Land Commission, should appreciate that whatever priorities they may have set for 2014, Kenyans will continue to indict both if service delivery remains unsatisfactory.

 

By IBRAHIM MWATHANE
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Last year marked a threshold for land reforms. There were changes of top office-holders in the line Ministry of Lands. The National Land Commission assumed office too, and has since recruited its chief technical officers.

Service consumers and stakeholders were magnanimous in patience, perhaps to give the new teams time to settle down.

But towards the end of 2013, there were unmistakable signs of discontent and impatience. Even the local media began to pose questions.





There were turf wars over office accommodation between the commission and the ministry.

These became pronounced following differences over the issuance of title deeds to squatters at the Coast and Nubians in Kibra. Later, the irregular appointment of a Lands Director-General by the Cabinet Secretary escalated the differences.

These differences are regrettable since, under the new land laws, the two must work together.

For predictable reasons, the initial intention to have the ministry dwell on policy issues while the lands commission drove service delivery wasn’t honoured in the laws.

While the ministry and the commission feuded, services at the ministry’s Ardhi House headquarters and at the counties suffered. Surveys by the Land Development and Governance Institute in the last half of 2013 indicated persistent customer dissatisfaction.

Kenyans complained about inefficiency and delayed services. They decried incidents of staff lateness in some lands offices, rent-seeking in others, and seizure by cartels of brokers working in cahoots with staff in most.

These surveys were corroborated by others done by the Commission on the Administration of Justice (the Ombudsman), which reflected poor service delivery.

Casual discussions with members of the public, lawyers, planners, surveyors and real estate developers on their experiences at Ardhi House and the nearby registries of Kiambu, Thika and Kajiado to obtain official searches, register property, resolve boundary disputes or seek development approvals vindicate this.

Yet the Lands ministry and the commission exist for these mundane processes. There is merit in focusing energies on repossession of public land, resolution of historical injustices, planning, adjudication and titling of land among others.

In the land sector, however, the bottom line remains the ease with which people can access information on maps and ownership, process property transfers, and obtain assurance on the security of land records on public, community and private land.

These basics drive the success of our real estate and housing sectors, lending, infrastructure development and a wide variety of other social-economic activities.

In our efforts to process and issue title deeds to more Kenyans, we must remember that if the ministry can’t get its act together in guaranteeing access to, and accuracy of, the existing ones, the problem will only become worse.

SERVICE DELIVERY

The Cabinet Secretary and her team, and the Land Commission, should appreciate that whatever priorities they may have set for 2014, Kenyans will continue to indict both if service delivery remains unsatisfactory.

While it is obvious that the ministry faces great challenges from the high numbers of manual records and lack of enabling technology, it is also clear that some of the obstacles such as poor staff attitude, lack of effective supervision, presence of brokers, rent-seeking, non-compliance with service charter timelines, and lack of prompt response to correspondence and customer complaints are surmountable.

The public would greatly appreciate any demonstrable effort to address such simple institutional deficiencies while solutions to the longer term challenge of computerisation and improvement of physical facilities are awaited.

County governments will soon realise that the routine complaints they will face will be on land issues and land registries. They should save themselves this trouble early by joining forces with the lands offices in their jurisdictions.

They could consider establishing competent monitoring units comprising of practising professionals, credible local leaders and public officers to ensure results and accountability.

Mr Mwathane is the chairman, Land Development and Governance Institute. (mwathane@landsca.co.ke)