Reject those who want to incite the public over land

The public exchanges between the Government and the Opposition on the disputed ownership of 134 acres of prime land in Karen is threatening to politicise an issue already before the court and clouding the rights of the litigants to a fair trial. Last week, President Uhuru Kenyatta waded into the debate when he accused the Opposition of trying to tarnish the image of his government when it claimed that senior Jubilee luminaries had fraudulently acquired this prime parcel at the centre of a litigation process for years.

The President raised a valid point—using an emotive issue such as the Karen dispute to win sympathy and support can be counter-productive when viewed against the violence and pain heated land issues have triggered in Kenya.

The merits and demerits of actions of stakeholders in this issue is a moot point here and cannot be discussed as the matter is before the court. What can be addressed is how public discourses of land matters can be handled, bearing in mind that these matters have been the cause of untold suffering among Kenyans from the time they fought for independence where the land issue was at the core of why we struggled for freedom, to the post-independence land clashes centering on these very issues.

Exploiting a dispute over land would appear churlish, even callous, when viewed in the context of political muckraking and propaganda at a time when hundreds of thousands of Kenyans are bearing the scars from conflicts associated with disagreements over land tenure and ownership.

Politicians must step back and allow statutory agencies and well-meaning stakeholders to address the pressing land problem bedeviling the nation. Jubilee, like all other political parties that presented candidates to run for president in 2013, has an elaborate manifesto that espouses how it wants to tackle the land problem.

From the squatter problem in much of the country whose gravity was brought to the fore after the Mpeketoni attacks left more than 60 people dead prompting investigations into the allotment of 500,000 acres to 22 companies that records show may have been irregularly allocated, to the potentially disruptive squatter problem at the Mau forest that threatens the survival of this critical water tower.

The land problem in Kenya is a complex one and cannot be oversimplified as the TJRC and Ndungu reports have acknowledged. These commissions, established to delve into what we now call historical injustices, have made their recommendations and whether they can be adopted within the framework of the existing legal framework ,still remains to be seen.

 But it is the sober and dispassionate discussions on these social, political and economic issues that regarding the land question that will help us get answers. Not political grandstanding and histrionics. Political posturing will only inflame passions and cloud discussions with narrow partisan and sectarian interests.

We saw how such posturing threatened the clean-up of registers at the Ministry of Lands which is in the process of streamlining operations at Ardhi House. We must now allow the digitisation of land records at this ministry to be finalised so that the corruption and opaqueness that has surrounded the issuance of title deeds can be dealt with and stamped out altogether .

Once this is done, the Government must move fast to complete adjudication exercises in most parts of the country so that more titles can be issued to meet the Land Ministry’s target of a million title deeds by the end of the year.

For this to happen, co-operation between the independent National Land Commission and the Ministry of Lands is paramount. To win the confidence of Kenyans, the ugly public exchanges between NLC chairman Mohammed Muhammad Swazuri and Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu must therefore cease.

The upshot is that public confrontations on the land problem have generated more heat than light. Any attempts to inflame public passions must be resisted.

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Land Public