KENYA – The Jubilee government has handed Charity Ngilu the ultimate challenge of her political and public service career by appointing her Cabinet Secretary for Lands, Housing and Urban Development.
Former Cabinet Minister Charity Ngilu
Early indications are that Mrs Ngilu is in for a rough ride, and land barons and forces arrayed against land reforms, and who were actually targets of the reforms process were digging in at Ardhi House.
Ngilu has a full plate and expectations are high a time navigating through newly discovered minerals, oil and infrastructure development on undemarcated communal land, poverty eradication, ethnic tensions and corruption by local and foreign commercial interests call for a hardnosed personality at Ardhi House.
In terms of expectations and timing, the closest comparison for Ngilu’s tenure is perhaps Bruce Mc Kenzie and Jackson Harvester Angaine in early 60’s, when expectations for land redistribution from the minority colonial settlers, to the majority African peasants were sky high and key driver of political discourse of the day
More recently, Mr Amos Kimunya comes closest, who came to office in 2003 at time indiscipline at Ardhi House was on the rampage and land grabbing had spiraled out of control to sickening levels, with civil servants and politicians grabbing every space they could lay their hands on from forests, schools, hospitals, road reserves.
Prof Kivutha Kibwana and James Orengo after Kimunya came and left with a wimper. The Narc administration sent a strong message there was a new Sheriff in town through a ruthless and unprecedented demolitions of properties on road reserves, repossession of public spaces on top of setting up of the Ndung’u Commission of Inquiry into illegal land acquisitions of the previous 40 years of independence.
Among the most daring and dramatic repossessions that remain towering examples of what a new purpose driven administration could achieve, remain the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC), and the Processional Way, public spaces whose titles had been converted into private hands and mortgaged in financial institutions.
Glorious climax
The glorious climax of this period was that for the first time in Kenya’s history, Kimunya announced in mid-2004, that prominent Kenyans, who had previously acquired public properties irregularly, were making a bee line to Ardhi House to voluntarily surrender title deeds in support of the government drive to restore order in the land sector!
While Kimunya mostly relied on administrative fiat, public support and political good will from the Kibaki administration, Mrs Ngilu has at her disposal better tools to shift the land reforms to a higher gear at accelerated speed.
Kimunya did not have the National Land Policy (Sessional Paper No 3 of 2009) and a new raft of land laws and institutions created by the Constitution (2010).
For instance, among arguments advanced to slow down, stall and eventually sidetrack the drive to fully implement the Ndung’u report which recommended repossession of all irregularly acquired public land, was that there was no law to guide cancellation of title deeds, and there was no legally established institutions in which the recovered properties would be vested on behalf of the public.
Title deeds to Karura Forest for instance were still intact and fears were rife it was just a matter of time before land barons allocated the forest start either offloading it to the market or embark on developments.
The National Land Commission (NLC) Act (2012) has since been enacted and the NLC established and it remains to be seen whether it will be nurtured and facilitated to execute its mandate or not.
So far, the Jubilee government has started off the National Land Commission on with the wrong signals pointing to a waning or absence of political goodwill.
For instance, the Jubilee government has only allocated Sh241 million to the NLC against an expected budget and workload of Sh2 billion.
Among key mandates, the NLC is expected roll out a speedy process to inquire into all historical land injustices and make recommendations to parliament on how to mitigate them once and for all-with a ten year time frame and ksh 10 billion budget- and specifically provide a legal road map on compensation of what can no longer be repossessed, restitution, or outright repossessions where possible.
This particular mandate has national stability and security implications as historical land injustices were ranked top on Agenda Four raft of urgent reforms (2008) that Kenya should implement speedily to heal ethnic and political tensions that continue to undermine and threaten Kenya’s nationhood.
Source Standard Media
