Paperless transactions, finally!

Finally, the Lands ministry is beginning to show its commitment to land reforms in the country. The ministry ended manual land transactions at the Nairobi registry on Monday this week by making it mandatory for rate payments, searches and queries to be done online.

From March 1, such services will go paperless in twelve other registries — Kajiado, Machakos, Mombasa and Kilifi. Others are Kwale, Nakuru, Kisumu, Eldoret, Bungoma, Thika, Kiambu and Meru.

To access the services online, one will have to register under the government's online tool e-Citizen that allows easy transacting, including paying bills, making inquiries and searches.

What does all this mean for service seekers in particular and the sector in general? For the individuals, this signals the end of long queues at Ardhi House and other land registries around the country. This will eventually translate into faster and, hopefully, better services.

Ordinarily, land searches in the manual era has been taking two or more weeks. This has sometimes led to corruption as some ministry officials are known to hide files so that they can be bribed to release search details. Brokers are also known to capitalise on the inefficiency and make a killing from service seekers and compromise lands officials.

With the launch of paperless transactions, this is hardly possible.

According to the chairman of Land Development and Governance Institute Ibrahim Mwathane, Kenya's quest for land reforms was partly informed by public frustrations while seeking services in lands offices.

In a newspaper commentary on Monday, Mwathane said that the findings of their periodic surveys to gauge public perceptions on the services provided in various land registries have shown that the reforms needed to improve service delivery in the sector "are pretty simple and implementing them calls for little or no extra money".

May the land reforms gain momentum.