Land fraud victims have claimed that rogue police officers are working with fraudsters in Machakos and Nairobi counties to grab private land.
With police involved, they say, the cartel has become a powerful pseudo-government whose actions have become bolder recently.
National Intelligence Service (NIS) briefs seen by the Nation show that the cartels have even attracted financiers from Western Asia. The foreign funding is also suspected to be used to facilitate extremist activities, which are a major security concern in parts of Eastlands.
The cartel is also suspected of contributing to deadly rivalries among security officers, with a number of them, especially in Utawala, having died in mysterious circumstances.
“We are now in distress. After we spent fortunes buying land, we are now faced with a situation where we cannot develop or use it as collateral to obtain capital. We cannot even sell off the land,” reads part of the letter.
The letter, signed by 11 representatives of the victims, including senior politicians, in service and retired civil servants, businessmen and ordinary Kenyans, states that they have been left holding title deeds to land that the government cannot guarantee ownership.
It is alleged that the cartels invade undeveloped private land, alter ownership documents through collaborators at the Lands ministry, finance youths to occupy the property as they sell the parcels to new owners, with rogue police providing security against arrest or eviction. The victims say that in some instances, it is police officers in civilian clothing who provide security during the forceful occupations and help the new buyers develop the holdings.
“As successive governments pay lip service to the menace, we have spent colossal amounts of money in seeking a form of reprieve in courts to no avail,” reads the letter.
Interestingly, despite some of the victims being government officers serving in the security sector and Judiciary, they have not been able to get justice.
“We are issued with court injunctions to chase out the grabbers but upon presenting them to police stations to be enforced, the cartels move in, hijack the command structures of the police service and end up cutting off judicial orders,” the victims say.
They describe what they have been going through as “the worst manifestation of state capture where the government itself, through its organs of authority and instruments of power, strategically placed themselves as thieves of private land”.
They say that the cartel has used political and security authorities to create an informal government.
“You find that among police officers, there are those working for the cartel and others working to investigate their errant colleagues ... there are politicians who are in the cartel while others are fighting them and in the Judiciary having those against but others active actors in the menace,” they complain.
The closest that the government came to declaring war on the cartel was on December 6, 2018, when the then Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i publicly vowed to annihilate all gangs in the real estate sector. He said the gangs “are entrenched in Mavoko and Kitengela sub-counties and we will no longer entertain this nonsense of people running rogue in this country doing all manner of things and we are just there doing nothing”.
“We cannot continue like this; where groups of mad men wake up one day, decide to invade private land and no one notices the illegality since all manner of monkey business is at play,” Dr Matiang’i said at a public rally in Athi River town.
In the letter, the victims urge the new government to act on the cartels.
“It is now the duty of President Ruto’s new government to demonstrate to us that it has the will to confront this gang. It’s predecessors since 1990 have failed and the state capture in our lands continue to play out,” they say.
They fear that the recent declaration by the President that they are no longer interested in establishing a judicial commission to probe extent of state capture is disappointing.
“We have the names of the victims of this land grab by government forces collaborating with street thugs. We have the list of who is who in the cartel and the only thing remaining is to order them out of private land, arrest, charge and jail them,” the victims state.
At the same time, some 500 Embakasi Ranching Company shareholders from Murang’a County have complained that they stand to lose 1,239 plots to a cartel that has infiltrated the ongoing titling of the ranch’s holdings.
The ranch’s chairman, Mr John Njoroge, told a meeting of shareholders in Kenol town on Tuesday that the verification of the shareholders’ register and the final titling list for the 16, 000 acres has been captured by the cartel.
“What happened after President Uhuru Kenyatta directed in 2018 that 35,000 title deeds be issued to members was commencement of a scramble for shares that were in dispute. Those who had filed complaints of their plots being swapped, double allocation and outrightly stolen were recorded as unclaimed and the final titling list had the same plots allocated to new shareholders provided by the cartel,” Mr Njoroge said.
He further claimed that the Embakasi cartel has officers who have worked in State House, security agencies, Lands ministry and the National Land Commission. He added that the cartel can only be dealt with through direct orders from the President.
But Nairobi Police Commander Adamson Bungei said claims of rogue police officers being involved in shady land deals were highly generalised, but they would act on specific concerns.
“I want to assure Kenyans that we will not entertain any cartels be they run by whatever formation in government or outside it. We are a professional police service that will deal with all criminals in real estate strictly as per the law,” he said.
Mr Bungei said that police officers can develop, buy and sell properties but they should never be involved in “organised criminal networks that deprive others the benefit of legal ownership to property”.
He added that there is no one who has the power to command the police to engage in criminal activities.
“Agreed that some might get creative and dare us, but I would sternly say that would be a career wrecking blunder,” he said.
The president and his deputy have since said that investigating the magnitude of state capture has the potential of derailing the new government’s agenda.
In an interview on Inooro TV, Mr Gachagua said that this does not mean the government will not act, “rather, we will silently and discreetly cancel their title deeds, deals, pending bills and licences to their illegal interests”.
He added that the Ruto administration will not allow gangs to control any aspect of the economy and “regardless of who is who in these schemes, we shall deal with them”.
On Thursday, Athi River East Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) officers appeared to have begun confronting the cartel. Led by the unit’s boss, Mr John Kanda, the sleuths raided a house suspected to be the cartel’s base and arrested six people.
Mr Kanda said the raid occurred in the evening after a tip off that manipulation of land ownership documents and records was being done at the house.
“Officers from Mlolongo DCI office accompanied by others from general duties carried out an operation, some of the illegal activities were being coordinated within Muungano police station,” Mr Kanda said.
Immediately after the arrests, the Nation was informed by a source that there was “raw pressure from left, right and centre to have the six released and the officers behind the arrest transferred”.
The sources said that some politicians in Machakos and Nairobi counties and senior security officers in Murang’a, Eastern Region and Nairobi were pushing for the suspects to be released unconditionally.
When asked about this, Mr Kanda responded: “I do not know about that, all I know is that we released them on bond and they will be arraigned on Tuesday.”
Police inventory records show that a bag containing five ballot books, two official receipt rolls and two share certificate books were confiscated during the raid. Other items recovered included share certificates, sale agreements, receipts, stamps and seals.
Mr Kanda said the case had been taken over by the DCI’s land fraud unit and that they shall crack down on all members of the cartel.
He added: “We have a security command that is supportive and my team has the capacity to disrupt these complicated cartels and put to a stop to the land fraud they have inflicted on innocent people.”
Mr Kanda said with plots going for millions of shillings, the land battles involve billions of shillings.
