Kenya’s new land law must protect peasants

NAIROBI: The clamour to enact a law which proposes a tenure system that protects community land rights is as old as colonialism. The Community Land Bill (2015), discussed and moved through the second reading in Parliament last week, is the furthest successive regimes have gone in getting a law towards protection of communities that own land jointly.

For far too long, community land was treated as a poor cousin to registered individual land. The Bill is therefore a bold and radical attempt to reverse and change this historical anomaly and injustice that rendered millions of individuals and groups vulnerable to marginalisation, forced evictions and poverty.