Lands ministry knocks down office walls in graft war

The Lands ministry has shifted to open plan offices in a bid to stamp out corruption seen to derail property market growth.

The time taken to execute a property transfer can drag on for months as the “missing files syndrome” plays a big role in delaying service delivery, say industry players.

“The reforms at the ministry are proving to be beneficial not only to clients who can now get quicker services, but also to the ministry as its service fee collection has doubled to reach Sh155 million per week,” said Commissioner of Lands, Zablon Mabea.

He said the ministry would benchmark the quality of services offered against successful countries.

One such success story is Sweden where a property transfer takes under 10 minutes to finalise because services are centralised and all relevant information is held in a pool accessed through a central data management system.

A centralised point of service delivery will see the integration of different departments in the open plan offices.

This is expected to eliminate cases of files getting stuck in different departments as is the case at the moment.

Professionals including land economists, surveyors and valuers present at a forum meant to evaluate the implications of this year’s budget on the property industry pushed for deeper reforms, even at the ministry plans to roll out an exercise that will see all documents available in soft copy.

The allocation of Sh230 million for the computerisation of the ministry’s operations is meant to create a database where electronic information will be made assessable to users outside the ministry by end of the year.

Other developments that the ministry will undertake include making land rate payments electronically.

This is expected to increase efficiency as the bureaucracy involved in making the payments would be eliminated.

Wafula Nabutola, a surveyor attending the forum, said the reforms will increase revenue collection since investors will be more willing to transact transparently with the ministry.

“The difficulty involved in getting services have discouraged many people from involving the Lands ministry in the transfer of property, a factor that has denied the ministry a lot of revenue,” said Mr Nabutola.

Questions raised

Questions have also been raised about the ease with which foreigners have been able to acquire land in Kenya with the only restriction being on agricultural land.

Time taken for the ministry to have ready valuation reports for purposes of stamp duty levy is also set to be reduced as the newly launched service charter pegs it to 21 days despite the review of the Finance Bill to allow for 180 days up from 90 days for the payment of stamp duty.

Deputy commissioner for domestic tax Mwangi Githaiga said the upward revision of the time allowed to pay stamp duty to complete the transfer of a property was informed by the high number of deals that had to be aborted because most valuation report certificates are not ready within the allowed 90 day period.

“Allowing 90 more days for the payment of stamp duty levies is expected to increase the finalisation of transactions that have been locked out because they have taken longer than the allowed time to be completed,” said Mr Githaiga.

Key infrastructure

The annual budgets for respective local authorities failed to allocate money towards the development of key infrastructure such as estate roads and drainage, according Mwendwa Makathimo, the chairman of the Kenya Institute of Building.

“Developers are still allocating significant amounts in the development of key infrastructure, which is a responsibility of the council especially in opening up newer areas for construction,” said Mr Makathimo.

The annual budget sought to encourage compliance with the payment of land rates by restricting accumulated rates.

It had been established that land rate defaulters had failed to clear outstanding rates because the penalties for late repayment had accumulated to more than the value of the land itself.