A commission of inquiry into rampant grabbing of public land exposed how powerful individuals minted billions of shillings through shady deals ,including forcing State corporations to purchase stolen land at inflated prices.
Recommendations to repossess all grabbed public land, seize proceeds of ill-gotten wealth and to prosecute rogue public officials as well as other players implicated in the crime have never been implemented fully since the report was submitted in 2004 to then President Kibaki.
Successive governments have failed to implement the drastic recommendations by the Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal Allocation of Public Land contained in the Ndung’u report, named after the chairperson of the team lawyer Paul Ndung’u.
In a stinging indictment of Presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, the commission cited abuse of presidential discretion in the allocation of un-alienated government land for aiding the public land grabbing spree by politicians, their cronies and relatives.
A report of the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission also found Presidents Kenyatta and Moi, during their tenures between 1963 and 2002, presided over governments that were responsible for “illegal and irregular acquisition of land by the highest government officials and their political allies.”
Administrations led by their successors have also done little to address “historical grievances over land that constitute the single most important driver of conflicts and ethnic tension in Kenya.”
Most of the illegal and irregular allocations of public land took place during the tenures of Wilson Gachanja and Sammy Mwaita as commissioners of land, according to the Ndung’u report.
Officials of the defunct local authorities also abetted unbridled plunder of public land as did managers of State corporations.
Records examined by the commission revealed that most illegal allocations of public land took place just before or soon after the multi-party general elections of 1992, 1997 and 2002.
State corporations’ land was illegally allocated to “politically correct” individuals or companies who would in turn sell it back to government agencies at exorbitant prices.
The scheme involved the commissioner of lands issuing a letter of allotment and a grant of title would subsequently be made to the same individual or to a third party to whom the land would have been sold through an informal transfer.
At other times, the grabbing was triggered by a choreographed surrender of land by the State agency that would inform the commissioner of lands that the corporation “no longer needed a specified parcel of land.” Almost immediately, an individual or company would apply to be allocated the land in question.
“Next, the allottees would sell the land so illegally acquired to one or different purchasers for millions of shillings! Thus, in say three months, a civil servant, a politician, a political operative etc would transform from an ordinary Kenyan, financially struggling like many others, into a multi-millionaire,” the report says.
Strategic State corporations that had large swathes of land such as Kenya Railways, Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, Kenya Power and Lighting Company, various development authorities, Kenya Airports Authority and Kenya Industrial Estates lost their land in this manner.
The report also illustrates how State corporations were pressured to buy illegally acquired land from politically connected personalities.
Firms such as National Social Security Fund, Kenya Ports Authority, Kenya Pipeline Corporation and Kenya Reinsurance Corporation were forced to purchase such grabbed land at exorbitant prices.
Within five years from 1990 to 1995, the NSSF in particular spent up to Sh30 billion on suspect land deals throughout the country. In many cases, the Fund bought either illegally allocated public lands such as plots in Karura and Ngong forests, or land which was of little or no value, at inflated prices.
This includes Sh500 million that NSSF paid to Sharjah Trading company in 1995 for part of land that had been illegally excised from Kenya Veterinary Vaccines Production Institute (Kevevapi) in Industrial Area, Nairobi. Kevevapi lost 63 out of 93 ha in the early 1990s.
Another shady deal involved portions hived off Karura forest and which powerful illegal beneficiaries, who included two prominent businessmen and a relative of an influential family, sold off for Sh550 million to the Kenya Re-Insurance Corporation.
Yet another daring heist in 2001 saw land hived off from Ngong forest subdivided into 32 plots and allocated to 13 companies. Between August 28 and 29, 2001, the 13 companies sold the plots to Kenya Pipeline for Sh262 million. The report details the beneficiaries who include high ranking government officials.
Central Bank of Kenya also bought a plot reserved as a public parking off Haile Selassie avenue from a company associated with an MP in the former Kanu regime and an assistant minister in the Narc government for Sh300 million.
Kenya Power also splashed Sh78 million on marsh land in Loresho from Libra Setting limited, and Kenya Power which bought 58-acre plot from Rapsel limited for Sh250 million.
The brazen grabbing was also rampant at the local authorities. For example, certified copies of the minutes of a budget meeting of the Mombasa Municipal Council listed the allocation of public utility plots to councillors and civil servants in the agenda.
The commission ruled that all allocations of public utility land were illegal and had to be nullified. “Such lands should be repossessed and restored to the purpose for which they had been reserved.”
The report also recommended that all current letters of allotment issued as a consequence of an illegal allocation of public land should be revoked.
Another recommendation was that all public officials who facilitated or participated in the illegal allocation of public land should be investigated and prosecuted as well as retired in the public interest.
Successive governments have also refused to implement the TJRC report that also condemned failure to restore communities uprooted from their ancestral lands by the colonial administration.
