Charity Ngilu and Dr Mohamed Swazuri speak out on Langata primary school land dispute

Kenya: National Land Commission Chairman Mohamed Swazuri on Monday said documents used by a private developer to lay claim to a portion of Langata Primary School are fake.

Swazuri also announced he had received a complaint exposing alleged grabbing of a section of Shauri Moyo Secondary in Nairobi.

Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu has said the private developer on the disputed Langata Road Primary School land will be prosecuted if investigation reveal that he grabbed the said land.

Ngilu said in Mombasa o Monday that the National Land Commission {NLC} was handling the matter and that those behind the fraud will be arraigned in court.

On Monday, the NLC Chairman Mohamed Swazuri, who was with Ngilu, said investigation have revealed that the land belongs to the school and that it should be reverted back to the institution's use.

"On Friday we visited the school and we want to reaffirm that the land belongs to the school. Before our visit at the school we had meaningful documents indicating that it is a public land," said Swazuri.

He said that the disputed piece of land was amalgamated in 1974 with the original one that was allocated to the school in 1972 and an allotment letter issued to the institution in 1975.

"There is no way a person could have allocated the land in 1989 and issued it with the allotment letter in 1994. The documents to that effect were fake," said the NLC Chairman.

At the same time Swazuri said that he had also received complaints from Shauri Moyo secondary school and he will visit the institution this week.

He said that given that all public schools in the country do not have land title deeds, their land had been grabbed.

"I've issued a notice to all public schools starting from the nursery to tertiary and universities to give the commission the status of their land because we know that land in most of these institutions have been grabbed," he said in Mombasa after the opening of the one-week workshop for Land Administration Officers.

Ngilu said that the ministry will this year clean up all the 52 land registries across the country and digitize them to make them efficiency.