Assurance on land vital

What you need to know:

  • The government normally has good intentions, such as streamlining the delivery of public services.
  • In the absence of proper communication, rumour, speculation and innuendo take centre-stage.

Nothing has stunned landowners lately as much as a government statement on title deeds that appears to have been issued quietly.

Thanks to its circulation on social media, the statement requiring property owners to apply for new title deeds sparked public uproar, forcing Lands Cabinet Secretary Farida Karoney to come out and clarify the issue.

Ideally, this should have been the start, with the CS explaining what this was all about, instead of unleashing the document and catching the people by surprise. The government normally has good intentions, such as streamlining the delivery of public services.

However, there is a need to properly and comprehensively communicate with the public before or during the rollout of programmes that are bound to drastically change the way things have been done before.

In the absence of proper communication, rumour, speculation and innuendo take centre-stage. In this case, there has been talk of a plot to grab other people’s land, and yet the government was only trying to comply with a constitutional requirement.

New title deeds

The Lands CS has explained why all the landowners must now apply for new title deeds.

According to the CS, the 2010 Constitution brought about a shift in land policy, requiring Parliament to revise, consolidate and rationalise land registration, with the old titles being cancelled and replaced with new ones under the Land Registration Act, 2012.

The migration will not in any way change the ownership, size and other interests under those titles. The Lands ministry hopes this will minimise land fraud. The objective is to have a centralised land registration to eliminate fraud and delays in service delivery.

Noteworthy is the assurance that a notice will be published in the newspapers and announced on radio inviting owners to apply for the replacement of title deeds.

This is going to be a massive undertaking that needs to be properly coordinated and publicised to safeguard the interests of all landowners.