Land records digitisation to go beyond 2022
The ministry has admitted it is running on borrowed time as it strives to clean and protect Kenyans’ land records.
Past fraudulent activities within the lands sector will cost Kenyans dearly, as they will push the digitisation of records by the Ministry of Lands beyond December 2022.
This will result in the process spilling over to the next government, after the August 2022 General Election, leaving the full implementation of one of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s key legacy projects at the mercy of the next government.
The ministry has admitted it is running on borrowed time as it strives to clean and protect Kenyans’ land records.
Lands Cabinet Secretary Farida Karoney yesterday indicated that it was impossible to digitise all of Kenya’s land records before the end of next year, due to the depth of problems officials handling the actual cleaning of data at the ministry are facing.
“We started this programme in February 2018. We had hoped to finish within two years, but that was because we did not understand the scope of the problem. But as we analysed the data sets, we realised it wasn’t possible to do it as quickly as we thought we would. In our strategic plan, we have until the end of December 2022 to fully digitise all land records in Kenya. So far we’ve done one (county), we are now doing the second in Murang’a,” Ms Karoney said.
The ministry believes that only through fully uploading land-related data onto the new National Land Management Information System -- Ardhisasa, can the government assure Kenyans of the sanctity of title deeds and the integrity of other transactions, since the system Kenya has been using has had many loopholes that gave room to fraudulent and corrupt activities. The new system, Ms Karoney said, is able to detect any transaction, and capture audit trails in case of fraud.
In a tour of the ministry’s Ardhi House where Kenya’s manual land records are kept and the National Geospatial Data Centre (NGDC) hosting Ardhisasa yesterday, Ms Karoney took the media and the Presidential Delivery Unit, led by the technical adviser to the President, Mr Mutahi Ngunyi, through the chain of processes leading to the whole digitisation.
The ministry is not uploading details for land parcels with integrity issues, which has occasioned a backlog of, particularly, land in Nairobi, which has been fully digitized. The owners of such land cannot conduct critical transactions on such parcels.
“We hope by the end of this financial year (July 2021-June 2022) we will have done at least 20 to 23 counties and then we will be left with another six months to December to see if we can do another 10 counties or so. I don’t think we will cover the 46 (counties) as we had anticipated, but if we cover half, we will have covered the milestones that the President expected us to cover,” Ms Karoney said.
She said the ministry was focusing on areas suspected to have serious problems, especially around urban centres “because that is where the layers of fraud have complicated our digitisation programme”.
“I don’t think it is realistic to expect that the mess we have created over 60 years can be resolved in a period of five short years. It is impossible. But we have started the journey, we have laid the foundation, we think we have laid a very strong foundation and we think that subsequent administrations will build on the foundations that we have created,” the CS said.
The mess and the delays have been affecting many Kenyans, locking cash out of circulation in the economy, as transactions such as charges, applicable when parties apply for loans from banks and need collaterals such as land, or land transfers, have been among those blocked by the hitches.
Ms Karoney said over the past month, the ministry had unlocked Sh21 billion in relation to transactions dealing with charges.
However, some of the challenges the ministry has been coming across are beyond its internal capacity to solve due to the layers of corruption involved. Such cases are being referred to a multi-agency team formed by the government to analyse the particular documents and decide what should happen.
“Some cases are fairly straightforward cases of fraud, which can be corrected at the ministry internally. In others, the corruption and layers of corruption are such that it is beyond the scope of the Ministry of Lands. What we can correct as a ministry by putting together the data sets from the different departments, we are correcting, and that is why when we launched (on April 27), we had 19,000 parcels on the platform, now we have 40,000,” Ms Karoney said.
The ministry is banking on young people to drive the reform as they perform all processes of data cleaning and ingestion to the new system, while the older faces at Ardhi House remain in the halls dealing with manual records that constitute thousands of old files.
Some of the officers involved in the process indicated they were hired on contract around 2019, precisely for the programme, running both the manual and digital cleaning until the data is fed into the new system.
“Now going forward, there is no reason whatsoever for an officer of government to claim that they do not know the decisions they make are wrong because they have all the information for them to make a decision,” Ms Karoney said.
The CS said at the Nairobi registry, the ministry was still struggling to clean the records of more than half the 90,000 parcels of land, bogged down by fraud and inconsistencies.
“We are still struggling to clean the 46,000 or so parcels of land, but we hope over time, working with land owners, we shall be able to place the bulk of those data sets onto the platform. Some will be damage beyond repair, meaning they are either on a road reserve, in forest land, in airport, police stations or other public assets,” she said.
The ministry has so far processed about 25 million documents onto the digital platform, with 29,988 registered users and 1,043 registered companies. To transact and access services on the platform, one has to register as a user.
Officials from different departments within the ministry and from the National Land Commission have been placed under one roof at the geospatial data centre for ease of coordination, and to ensure the digitisation runs efficiently.
