Three crucial lessons from Kirima land
Some of the houses illegally constructed on a parcel of land owned by late billionaire Gerishon Kirima’s family in a photo taken on October 24, 2023.
To claim that matters land ownership in Kenya are emotive ipso facto and so more often than not is an understatement.
From relatives slitting each other’s throats to forgery of land ownership deeds, the acrimony and unruliness elicited by land-related feuds in and out of our courtrooms tells it all.
However, a striking exception touching on the ongoing controversy on the late Gerishon Kirima’s Njiru area land saga is markedly instructive, if I may say.
After a decade-long court battle between the Kirimas and squatters, the Nairobi Environment and Land Court declared it legitimate property belonging to the Kirima estate. The same court proceeded to grant the Kirima family the right to evict the illegal occupants by December 31 last year.
But, alas, the Kirima family in an unprecedented move instead extended an olive branch to the occupants of their land giving them a chance to buy and own the respective parcels they occupy in an amicable truce.
That consideration was mooted in spite of the Cabinet Secretary of Lands, Public Works, Housing and Urban Development, echoing the sentiments of the court by affirming that the hitherto contested land belonged to the Kirima family.
Of several other reasons as to why I consider the Kirima land saga in question instructive are three simple lessons we should take home from a spectacle presaged by many other examples with similar or near-identical traits. Lesson number one.
It is foolhardy and downright injudicious for one to purchase property through an agent whose authority to transact is not readily verifiable. Doing so is ensnaring oneself in a maze that could expose any hapless land buyer in a heedless quagmire whose eventuality is likely to amount to loss of precious savings.
Lesson number two. It is possible — as indeed demonstrated by the Environment and Land Court — to serve justice with a sense of candour that ignores the drumbeats of political instigation and the common folly portended by misadventures associated with mob psychology.
I think so because generally there is a perverse, yet prevalent tendency of favouring the underdog even when all jurisprudential odds are stacked against him.
Lesson number three. A sense of altruism and largesse can prevail even when a court of law expressly grants authority portending adverse implications on a contesting party. Very rarely have we witnessed willingness by a dispossessed landowner to cede land, albeit on a willing-seller willing-buyer basis, in a bloodless win-win situation based on a principle informed by the desire to achieve the greater good. Simply put, this is commendable of the Kirima family.
It will be remiss of me not to recognise that the matter in reference — notwithstanding the magnanimity exhibited by the Kirima family — was not without the usual nauseating meddling that some individuals in search of political capital are wont to engage in.
On the whole, if the Executive, lawmakers, court officials and landowners could borrow a leaf from the Njiru land pitting the Kirimas against squatters, phony property dealers and assorted scavengers, we shall inch closer to a more hygienic era of the resolutions needed in the myriad land cases brimming in our courts of law countrywide. I rest my case.
Mr Gikuru is an advocate of the High Court. @GikuruSK
