Columnists

Enforce productive use of land resources

tea

A tea farm in Nandi County. FILE PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA | NMG

Land is a finite resource. However, land use practices in Africa suggest that this resource is used as though it was infinite.

This is what I gathered from the Institution of Surveyors of Kenya (ISK) last week where I gave a keynote speech at a conference.

This regional conference, whose theme was ‘Land and Property Sector in Africa: Marching into the Future’, was organised by the ISK and the Netherlands’ Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster).

Land secretary Jacob Kaimenyi and the Netherlands ambassador to Kenya were the chief guests. In my speech, I noted the fact that the surveying profession is perhaps underestimated. We generally look at it as a fringe service. It is not, if you look at it as the core service to our food security and, by extension, one that could enable poverty reduction.

Their role is central to effective management of the resource that define our livelihood.

That is why in my view, the conference came at the right time after predictions by experts that Africa is staring at a serious food crisis in the next five to ten years if we do not change our food security strategies.

Productivity in virtually all cereals that form the basis of Africa’s food security is on the decline. The cereals market remains undeveloped. Farmers are disgruntled with frequent imports and unstructured subsidy programmes.

As a result, many farmers especially those within peri-urban areas are converting agricultural land into commercial housing activities.

Kiambu County, for example, has the most fertile land for agricultural use but that is changing fast, giving way to commercial property development that is currently more lucrative than food production.

In March this year, the government launched its much-awaited National Spatial Plan to guide the management and use of land and land-based resources.

This is certainly a noble idea, but in the mind-set of users, planning is an irritation. Yet planning is the only way by which we can achieve productivity, equity, efficiency and sustainability.

Some of the topics dealt with at the conference included: Opportunities under the Sectional Properties Act, land administration for national development, fit-for-purpose land administration, financing and structuring of real estate finance, addressing housing challenges.

This gathering in effect was discussing Chapter 4 of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights with specific reverence to section 43 sub-section B.

Important as this event was, the media gave it a wide berth. Amidst our brinkmanship politics, they did not consider it important to give the forum coverage especially for trying to address rights “to accessible and adequate housing, and to reasonable standards of sanitation.”

READ: Kenya explores mediation to help unlock cash held in land wrangles

The local media privileges political noise over professional and expert views. From the discussions, it is apparent that Kenya is very good at developing beautiful documents, legislation and policies that are not properly marketed to the people who need them.

One such document is the Sectional Properties Act that in essence enables people to invest in real estate without necessarily owning the land.

This law provides “for the division of buildings into units to be owned by individual proprietors and common property to be owned by proprietors of the units as tenants in common and to provide for the use and management of the units and common property and connected purposes.”

Kenyans have resulted to buying one-eighth of an acre plots of land, expanding cities into agricultural land. The outcome of such investment is the fact that people are spending as much as 30 per cent of their income on transportation.

Indeed, if we had taken the law seriously and embraced the concept of sustainable land use, we could have focused on high density structures to ease the excessive demand for land today that is making housing unaffordable for many.

The cumulative effect of high-density housing far exceeds the current democratised use of land that is to a large extent a licence to wantonly destroy the environment.

There is wisdom in learning from countries like the Netherlands and Japan where national land use programmes have enabled greater urbanisation, astounding food production and desirable environmental protection.