When Kenya's attorney general told the International Criminal Court in July this year that there were no records to indicate that President Uhuru Kenyatta owned any land in the country, his comments offered a reflection of the mysterious nature of landownership in Kenya.
It is well known that the family of Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, father to the current president, owns large tracts of the
most productive land, particularly in central Kenya and at the coast. Forbes Magazine placed the total land owned by Kenyatta and his family at 500,000 acres of prime land spread across the country.
A survey 2014 found that 50 percent of Kenya's wealth is in the hands of political families, with the ownership of land providing the core of this wealth.
Secret ownership
The skewed ownership of land is dire in a country where only 17 percent of the land is arable, with the rest mostly arid and semi-arid. The Kenya Land Alliance says that more than 65 percent of this productive land in Kenya is in the hands of only 20 percent of the population.
The chaotic nature of land records in Kenya obviously suits the political and business elite who would like to maintain secrecy over their ownership of the country's land. In a recent audit, the Lands Ministry discovered that 1.3 million files were lost, misplaced or misfiled.
Any hope that the enactment of new laws would solve what Kenyans have come to call the 'land question' has been replaced by disappointment, even frustration by the lack of progress and constant finger pointing amongst those entrusted with the job of cleaning up the mess that goes back to the country's colonial period.
White Highlands
Land is an emotive issue in Kenya. The fight for independence was based on the struggle to revert ownership of land from the colonialists back to the Africans. Vast arable land in the Rift Valley was designated as the White Highlands, reserved for European settlers, while the indigenous communities were moved out.
The authority to allocate Crown Land was vested in the colonial governor and he issued grants of leases for 999 years to the European settler community. It is the same allocation by direct grant that facilitated the irregular allocation of public land after Independence.
In 1963 a total of 7.5 million acres or half of the agricultural land in Kenya was in settler hands, with individual farmers like Lord Delamere reported to possess as much as 1 million acres.
The Africanization of the White Highlands, areas previously reserved for European settlement, was carried out through the Million-Acre Scheme funded by the British government and the World Bank, to facilitate the orderly transfer of ownership of farms owned by settlers who wanted to leave after independence.
Land grabbing
The new African political class and home guards, who had made fortunes by collaborating with the colonial government, bought thousands of acres from the departing Europeans, denying the majority of Kenyans the right to own land.
How's the situiation 8 years later ?
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