Columnists

Digital land management system needed

LAND

With digitization, one officer can initiate the transaction and follow it through to the end in the system. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Kenya’s Vision 2030 recognises proper land administration and management as a springboard for development. The vision outlines establishment of a digital Land Information Management System (LIMS) as one of the remedies for land administration and management.

In Mid Term Plan (2012-2017) for the Land Sector, the ministry was to deliver a digital LIMS. However, we witnessed reorganisation and digitisation of some of the land documents in Nairobi registry.

An attempt to offer online land searches at the Nairobi registry was thwarted by a court order pending the hearing of a case by the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) versus the Ministry of Lands.

Currently, the LIMS in use is purely paper-based, disintegrated and not up to date. To explain just how the system is disjointed; a single land transfer process involves a paper trail in more than three different offices. Let us say you are buying land in Busia-Kenya; you will search at the Land Registry, buy a map at another office- the Survey Office, and valuation for stamp duty at another office -the Valuation Office.

With digitization, one officer can initiate the transaction and follow it through to the end in the system.

It will save citizens time and taxpayers money in terms of salaries paid to officers and purchasing of paper-based cumbersome equipment such as Kalamazoo and parcel files used to store documents in the registry.

The government loses millions of shillings every day from the fragmented paper-based system through falsification of land values for stamp duty payment. With a geo-enabled digital system, through spatial analysis tools land values will be easily be retrieved. With configuration the system will flag such transactions.

ded is for the government to provide a server, computers and create a local network for all the land offices — not forgetting, a review of the current land laws to provide for supporting of the digital LIMS.

JUSTUS WAMBAYI, Land administration specialist.