Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu checks files at the Lands Office
in Mombasa on August 4, 2014. The offices have been closed for 10 days
for digitisation of records. Mrs Ngilu has said that investigations into
illegal allocations will be extended to 1963. PHOTO | KEVIN ODIT
NATION MEDIA GROUP
Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu on
Monday extended the net on grabbed land in Lamu County, saying title
deeds for all illegally acquired land from 1963 would be revoked.
Mrs Ngilu said all illegally acquired land must be repossessed irrespective of who owned it.
Surveyors
have been sent to Lamu and investigations have been started to
establish the status of each parcel of land with a view to repossessing
illegally acquired land and allocating it to indigenous communities.
Mrs
Ngilu, who was speaking at the Uhuru na Kazi County headquarters in
Mombasa, said all those who had grabbed land would be dealt with and
that the Jubilee Government had the political will to carry out the
task.
Without giving any time frame, the minister said
the matter was in the hands of investigators who would compile their
report after which the implementation would be done without fear or
favour.
She addressed journalists after holding a
closed-door meeting with land officials and County Commissioner Nelson
Marwa. She was later taken round the lands offices on second floor which
she said had been closed for 10 days together with the Kilifi and Kwale
offices to pave the way for reorganisation and digitisation of records.
ISSUE THREE MILLION TITLE DEEDS
Mrs Ngilu said that between independence in 1963 and 2013, only 5.5 million title deeds had been issued.
“Within
only a year, we have issued 1.5 million of them and we are targeting to
issue three million in the next three years,” she said. “We will do it
and we have started doing it.”
She challenged the
Opposition to be clear on the Lamu land saga, which the government has
said is part of the insecurity problem that has rocked the Coast in
recent months.
“I wonder how anybody can challenge the
revocation of such fraudulently acquired land. I think such a person is
playing very bad politics. As we all know, conflicts in the Coast and in
the country have been due to land issues,” she said.
Addressing
an earlier press conference, the Lamu-based Shungwaya Welfare
Association chairman, Mr Mohamed Mbwana and Muslims for Human Rights
(Muhuri) chairman Khelef Khalifa expressed disappointment that President
Uhuru Kenyatta had revoked land only acquired between 2011 and 2012.
They
claimed that historical land injustices which begun way back in 1963 as
revealed in the recommendations of the Ndung’u Land Report, the Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) and other commissions had
not been implemented.
Separately, Haki Africa, a human
rights organisation demanded that the Lands, Urban Planning and Housing
ministry must work with all Coast counties, the National Land Commission
and other relevant institutions to make sure the process was legal and
binding.
“We demand that this process must cover the
period since independence. We have cases of historical land injustices
that will require the revocation of title deeds covering millions of
acres at the Coast,” said Haki Africa executive director Hussein Khalid
in a press statement.
Similar sentiments were echoed by
Human Rights Agenda (Huria) executive director Yusuf Lule, who also
called for investigation of “all former Commissioners of Lands, Cabinet
ministers, permanent secretaries and any other officials who had direct
or indirect involvement of any illegal acquisition and or allocation of
land with a view to prosecuting them”.
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