We must thank Kilifi North MP Owen Baya for intervening on a matter that remains outstanding. This column said the National Land Commission Act provides for the review of grants and dispositions of public land to establish their propriety and legality but only within the first five years of commencement of the Act.
The NLC Act took effect in April 2012. Therefore, this timeline expired from May 2017. Indeed, any further attempts by the NLC to address related matters have met legal challenges.
So while the country beats up the commission for not doing more to recover irregularly allocated public land, its hands remain tied by this lacuna in the law. For this reason, any repossession efforts by the team will suffer adverse consequences until this matter of timeline is addressed.
In addition, the National Land Commission Act of 2012 was amended through the Land Laws (Amendment) Act of 2016 to provide that claims for historical land injustices would only be admissible for hearing by the commission if presented within a timeline of five years from the commencement of the Act.
This law took effect in September 2016. This timeline, therefore, expired in September 2021. In practical terms, this means that the commission cannot receive any further claims on historical land injustices, regardless of their legitimacy, or the reasons they may have been debarred. On this too, the law limits the land commission.
In response to the two gaps, Baya tabled the National Land Commission (Amendment) Bill No 10 of 2022, dated 15th March 2022 during the sixth session of the National Assembly of the 12th parliament. Unfortunately, Kenya’s 12th National Assembly adjourned sine die on 9th of June, 2022 before this bill could be debated and enacted into law.
Given parliamentary protocols, the bill is therefore dead, and the two timelines above remain applicable. This fundamentally obstructs public institutions that would wish to pursue cases of their previously grabbed public land through the commission. Similarly, those with pending historical land injustice claims, or those that were filed out of time, must feel quite desperate.
It will therefore be incumbent upon members of the 13th parliament to consider moving a similar motion, or even two different motions given the uniqueness of each issue, once in session. Government too, through the Ministry of Lands could originate them to seal any legal loopholes and settle the thorny issue permanently.
