Wahome stressed the need to amend certain sections of the Land Act to stop those cartels in their tracks.
Alice Wahome, the Cabinet Secretary nominee for the Ministry of Lands, Public Works, Housing and Urban Development, on Thursday, August 1 talked tough on the matter of land cartels in the wake of rampant land grabbing across the country.
Appearing before the National Assembly Appointments Committee vetting persons nominated for Cabinet Secretary positions by President William Ruto, Wahome stressed the need to amend certain sections of the Land Act to stop those cartels in their tracks.
She revealed that she was willing to take the war to the roots, accusing cartels of going to the extent of disrespecting title deeds, which are supposed to be definitive proof of land ownership.
A view of Ardhi House in Nairobi. /FILE
“I am willing to take the fight to the crime scenes. These people have stolen land left, right, and centre. Government, institutions have lost land to people working within.
“I think we need to work on the amendments very quickly to the Land Act so that the minute the technical information on the land record is known to be interfered with or to have been fraudulently secured or changed, then the registrar should be able to immediately effect a cancellation,” she said.
She noted that during her previous tenure at the Ministry of Lands, she flagged fraudulent documents and that amendments to the Land Act would provide the registrar of lands with clear guidelines for addressing fraudulent activities.
Wahome termed it a national tragedy that a situation is rife where a title is not primary evidence of ownership, adding that the Ministry was made aware of very many cases of fraud being carried out by Kenyans.
According to her, some of them have surprisingly made money through those kinds of fraudsters but had possibly cleansed the money in institutions like schools, bhang, or other real property investments.
“I have impugned some of the documents because they are obvious frauds and therefore I am not willing to take the dirty work of my Ministry to the courts. Let the person alluding or alleging that they have a good title deed go take me to court and that should happen to everybody,” she continued.
In terms of land records, Wahome revealed that the Ministry needed up to Ksh40 billion to digitise land records under the National Land Information Management System also known as Ardhisasa.
“The country needs to be able to have fibre networking in other places and therefore maybe in the five years we can safely do this provided that we get sufficient budget as a country to cover it,” Wahome added
Digitisation of land records entails the construction of an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) for managing land title records including scanning, indexing, and archiving deed files among other digital operations.
Wahome disclosed that the digitisation of land records through the Ardhisasa system, launched on April 27, 2021, has so far covered a third of Nairobi’s land.
The Ministry has completed digitisation in Nairobi and Murang’a Counties, with Isiolo set to follow in a month. The process is currently underway in Mombasa County.
