Villagers in Lamu have taken a long-standing land tussle to the office of the Ombudsman, citing delays in concluding the matter by other State agencies.
The Commission on Administrative Justice (Ombudsman) wrote to residents of Siyu Village in Pate, Lamu East sub-county, through Abubakar Dumila, a crusader and spokesman on land rights, on December 6 confirming receipt of their complaints.
For the last four years, Mr Dumila, Mohamed Shee and Swidiq Ali have been leading a campaign to have 1,283 title deeds for land measuring 2,520 hectares cancelled, claiming it mainly benefited influential people.
The crusaders have since taken the matter to the Lamu provincial administration, county government and the National Land Commission (NLC) but say there has been no clear direction as they were being taken round in circles.
"We are in the process of reviewing your complaint for admissibility and shall get in touch with you to update you on any developments," said the Ombudsman.
Dumila had petitioned the Ombudsman over the delayed response to complaints of irregular allocations of alleged ancestral land to powerful individuals and failure by Government agencies to act on recommendations by a parliamentary committee that visited the village in 2012.
The residents said they were aggrieved by the lack of action from NLC, which once promised to visit the village and settle the tussle.
According to Dumila, a meeting with NLC officials at KPA Hall in Lamu town on March 7 resolved that the commission would visit the disputed land on March 24, but it did not.
"We had expected that the commission would cancel title deeds at both the Siyu and Pate settlement schemes where residents have cited cases of fraudulent land allocations," Dumila argued.
He said Parliament's Committee on Land and Natural Resources chaired by Mbeere South MP Mutava Musyimi sat in Siyu on July 23, 2012, and filed a report in Parliament, with recommendations, in November 2012. But these are yet to acted on by relevant State agencies.
Dumila noted that the county's Department of Land at one time requested for a caveat to be placed on the disputed land pending determination of the matter but nothing happened.
