- So far, the Nairobi land registry has been fully digitised in q painstaking process that started in March 2018.
- All the land documents in the city have been uploaded onto the online platform
Image: JULIUS OTIENO
Landowners in at least 23 counties from June next year can easily transact business from the comfort of their homes or offices in far-reaching government reforms.
Lands CS Farida Karoney on Monday unpacked a raft of reforms being implemented by her ministry to clean up Ardhi House.
For years it has been riddled with corruption and held hostage by cartels.
The ministry has embarked on thorough automation of land transactions and integration of departments to eliminate the labour-intensive process Kenyans have endured to receive services.
Because of the far-reaching reforms, the CS disclosed, the Jubilee administration has produced 5.2 million title documents since 2013.
The CS another 500,000 by the end of the current financial year to push the number to 5.7 million.
“Our target is to digitise registries in all counties by December 2022. By the end of this financial, we aim to have digitised 20 to 23 counties,” Karoney said.
“We can cover another 10 counties between then and December next year.”
The aim, the CS said, is to end manual handling of the land documents, get rid of the unscrupulous officers and other cartels who take bribes and manipulate records, leading to multiple allocations of land and other vices.
“Going forward, there will be no fraudulent transaction of land. That I can say with 100 per cent level of certainty,” Faridah said on Wednesday.
So far, the Nairobi land registry has been fully digitised in what the ministry terms a painstaking process that started in March 2018.
All the land documents in the city have been uploaded into the Land Information Management Systems commonly known as ArdhiSasa – a one-stop-shop for all land transactions.
Landowners are required to create accounts to access crucial services such as applications for titles and searches from their laptops or smartphones.
“Our ultimate goal is that every Kenyan who applies for a title gets it within 24 hours because everything is now integrated,” Karoney said.
The CS spoke during a media tour of the Ardhi House and the ultramodern National Geospatial Data Center on Thika Road to showcase reforms introduced by President Uhuru Kenyatta-led Jubilee administration.
She was accompanied by Mutahi Ngunyi, technical assistant to the President, who inspected the premises and the reforms at the ministry.
The ministry officials conducted practical transactions using the automated system – producing a title certificate on a record of 30 minutes and a search document in five minutes.
“Previously, searches used to take up to three months because you have to move from department to department and the process was manual. Today, for those in Nairobi, they take about 10 minutes,” the CS said.
To demonstrate the clean-up of the documents, the CS revealed that out of the about 90,000 title documents, only 40,000 have been accepted and uploaded into the system.
“The others are not on the platform because we are still doing data cleaning. We want to be sure that if we print a title, we want to tell with certainty that nobody will take away that land from you,” she said.
“We don’t have a very good record in terms of how we have managed this resource called land. We have a lot of data sets or some title documents that have been acquired by fraud or due process was not followed or the law was not followed.”
The Ministry has introduced a customer desk operating 24 hours a day to assist and respond to Kenyans using the system.
Where extreme cases that cannot be handled by the ministry are detected by the system, the CS said they are referred to a multi-agency task force even as she stressed that reforms are focused on securing the future as opposed to punishing culprits.
Farida revealed that the ministry has now embarked on the automation of registries in the remaining 46 counties, with Murang’a registry already underway.
Edited by Kiilu Damaris