Top Ministry of Lands officials moved

By NICHOLAS WAITATHU

KENYA: Senior officials at the Lands ministry have been reshuffled.

The transfers come days after President Uhuru Kenyatta called for an audit of land records at the ministry to root out graft in land transactions.

Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu confirmed that the audit is on-going.

Ephantus Murage, who has been the director of survey, has been moved to the Ministry of Mining and his deputy, Boaz Owino, transferred to the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum.    

Ceaser Mbaria, who was senior assistant director of survey, has replaced Murage. Julius Rotich, who has been in the Lands Registry, takes over from Owino. Murage handed over to Mbaria last Friday, The Standard established.

The two officers received their transfer letters last Friday directing them to hand over to the new officers and report to their new stations latest this morning.

Contacted for comment, Ngilu denied having influenced the transfer of the two officers.

“Transfer of officers from one department to the other is intended to add value to government activities. The transferred officers have a wealth of expertise and experience that will be applicable in the new stations they have been posted to,” said Ngilu in a telephone interview.  

She denied that the transfers are related to the President’s directive to audit land records to stem graft in land transactions.

“The services of the affected officers are still applicable in other departments within the government,” she added. 

200,000 acres

Uhuru ordered the audit during a tour of the Coastal region that also saw him issue title deeds to squatters in the area. He was responding to local leaders’ complaints that certain individuals, including Lands officials, former Cabinet ministers, Members of Parliament, and prominent business people had been allocated some 200,000 acres of land by corrupt ministry officials.

But the changes have caused some disquiet in the ministry, with claims that politics could undermine the land reforms agenda.

“Do the officers identified to occupy these key offices have any track record on reforms or are they business as usual adherents? It is in the public domain that no serious staff changes at senior level have ever been done to promote land reforms.

“So if the mentioned changes are not aligned to land reforms, they amount to a game of musical chairs,” said a land professional who did not wish to be named.  

The professionals stated that recruitment principles in the current dispensation ought to be followed so that the reform agenda in the land sector can attained. 

The professionals added that land legislations, namely Land Registration Act 2012, Land Act 2012 and National Land Commission Act 2012 must be fully implemented if sanity is to be restored in the sector. 

According to our source, Mbaria has been promoted from Job Group Q to S, while Rotich moves up to Job Group