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"id": 263882,
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"speaker_name": "Mr. Kimunya",
"speaker_title": "The Minister for Transport",
"speaker": {
"id": 174,
"legal_name": "Amos Muhinga Kimunya",
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"content": " Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I rise to second this Bill that will facilitate the formation of the land management body, the National Land Commission to take over the responsibilities that are currently handled through the office of the Commissioner of Lands and what has been put within the councils through the trust and all that. As I start on the seconding of this Bill, I want to recognize from my own experience as the Minister for Lands in 2003 to 2006. This was the first job I ever did in the Government. I was thrown into a Ministry that was just emerging from the histories of land grabbing and all the things that happened in the 1990s. I did learn a lot. One of the first things I appreciated is that land is, perhaps, the most emotive issue in this country. It is where you will find families will be coming and say I killed my brother or will just be fighting because of that small piece of land. That piece of land cannot even sustain the people who are fighting and killing over it. People will actually go to that extent of killing one another for it. Most of the wrangles, fights and cases in court in this country are to do with land. One of the amazing things you will find when discussing matters of land and the petitions you receive in that Ministry would be - and I am sure my colleague is receiving no doubt exactly the same. It really does not matter the social standing of the people claiming matters on land. Whether you are talking about churches owning land or laying some claim to land or being accused of actually taking some of the public land, the biggest defence at that point is that you will find that even people who should be advocating for fairness, they do not do so. Sometimes because of their religious convictions will tell that on land matters, let us put the faith aside. Let us, first of all, sort out this land matter. It is that emotive. I do remember elders from Shatuka Group Ranch. The first time I saw a Maasai elder shedding tears when they were discussing in terms of the boundaries and the alignments. It just tells you the extent that people go to fight over what they believe is their right over the land. The whole land issue goes back again into our history. Our forefathers shed their blood fighting over the land that had been taken over by the colonialists. I believe when the issue of historical injustices that the Commission will be looking into comes into proper perspective, we will not just be looking in some of the areas. However, when you look at all these lands even within Central Province, all these tea estates, they will be asking themselves who are the original owners of those lands? They were pushed away to villages, they were pushed away by colonialists; they were pushed into the forest to fight for that land, detained and given passes so that they could not fight over their land. Eventually, at Independence, they came back from detention only to find that that land had now been re-allocated into better uses by other people. So, when we talk of these historical injustices, I believe people, probably, have the temptations to think that these historical injustices only happened at the Coast and in Rift Valley. But right next door you will actually find that there are communities who up to now, and Chair has been identifying himself with some of those causes, in terms of people fighting for reparations for what happened to the Mau Mau; how they suffered at the hands of the colonialists as they fought over land. My late father was one of those people who was detained under the governor’s detention orders because of his role. My own birth, obviously, was delayed by the same period that he was detained for those years because I had to wait for him to come out of detention for me to be born. Otherwise, I would have been much older than I am now. That is on a light note. The issues they went through, when I go through the recordings that he recorded in terms of his own life in the detention, you can see the torture they underwent and all that had to do with fighting for land. He was among many others who fought for this land. The starting point in terms of looking at the issue of our land is knowing that our people are so intertwined with this land. You also look at all the people who have lost also their land since the advent of the multiparty politics in 1992. There are people who owned pieces of land in accordance with the Constitution in parts of this country. However, all over sudden, they were told branded foreigners and evicted from their pieces of land. Up to now, they are still living a dream that one day they will get to be resettled with their land and their assets. The same thing happened in 1997, 2002 and even worse 2007. We have seen the number of people living in IDP camps and we do hope that when we are now talking of those historical and current injustices over land those are some of the issues that we will be addressed. In 1992, it was the same, in 2002, the same and in 2007 it was even worse. This has made it very clear that all these land belongs to the people of Kenya. However managing it is doing so in trust for the people of Kenya. It set out the categories and this was debated extensively whether within the framework of Bomas or the framework of the National Land Policy Committees and whether within this Parliament. It was anchored very clearly within the Constitution in terms of who owns it. In fact, the biggest problem has been who then makes the decisions on this land that is owned by the people of Kenya? Who will be the person who will be entrusted to make that decision in terms of allocating rights to a piece of that land to a specific person to be told, “You can now use this land which is publicly owned for this period of time, for this purpose and on this conditions”. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, in terms of grants, leases and even extensions of some of those leases which were given 99 years ago, who will be making that decision? Who can make a decision in terms of whether land can be sub-divided or not and the protection of the families? When all consultations took place, if I recall starting from my own days when there was a commission by the former Attorney- General Charles Njonjo. We must thank him for the work he did through the Njonjo Commission. They did a lot of work in terms of looking at some of those things. They were the first ones to come up and say, “Yes, we need a National Land Commission to take away the responsibility of the Commissioner of Lands and use that institutional framework to manage our land? This was followed closely by the Ndung’u Commission that looked at the same issues but again, with a view to restoring sanity in terms of the land that had been taken away; public land that had been unfairly, irregularly, some unlawfully and some given out in all manner of political considerations rather than the actual use of the land. They also reemphasized the need for having an institutional framework for the management of our work. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, then the debate went to Bomas and I do remember the tent or group that was looking into that issue. We went through it together and following the collapse of the Bomas process and the failure of the referendum in 2005, the group was meeting over land then came to me as the Minister for Lands and said that land is so important, Bomas may have failed, the referendum may have failed but we must rescue the issue of land. We then reconstituted them to look at that within the framework of forming a national land policy. The Cabinet did approve it and I was so happy that even after I left the Ministry of Lands the Ministers who came after that continued with the process and that it has finally seen the light of day. I must thank Mr. Orengo for being so passionate on this matter to actually bring the process to some conclusion and get the matter into Parliament. We now have all these Bills coming in that will eventually form the National Lands Commission to take over the responsibilities so that decisions will never be made by one single person sitting waiting at the end of a phone call to be given directions by the appointing authority who is the President to tell them, “Can you allocate land to so and so or this group has come to see me, can you look for some piece of land to give to them”. The person cannot defy the authority. That is why all the former Commissioners of Lands are in some trouble one way or another because how do they defy the appointing authority. They make decisions which are based on their personal assessment of the time but because there is no that institutional framework to get them through, when the matter is challenged in court on matters of criminality in procedure, they then had to shoulder that personal responsibility. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I believe that when we now have this National Land Commission, guided by the principles that we put within the Constitution, guided with the principles we will be putting within the Land Bill itself, when this House eventually approves it and with the registration process that is now contained within the sister Bills that will also be coming to this House, we will at last resolve this matter of land. People will know, yes this is mine and this is private; how do I get protected into the future so that people can develop it with confidence. In terms of what is public, at least we will know who are we entrusting this responsibility of the little public land that is still left and the land within the counties that we will be getting through what was being given to the councils. The first task in the council meeting would be to agree, “Now that we have been elected, how many plots are available?” I went through this and I can quote it with authority. I went through this when started repossession of public land. Immediately you give it back to a council, the sad thing would be that the first meeting that would be taking place would be, “Now that this has come, how do we allocate it among ourselves? How do we allocate it among our supporters?” This is the kind of thing that we must bring to a stop so that what is public land and what is public asset is maintained for generations to come without people looking at it that now that they are in power, can they use their new found powers to take away from the public and deny our future generations the opportunity to utilize that land. It is because of that haphazard decision making on that we now find kiosks sprouting everywhere. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, look at the road at Kangemi for example. It is quite an eye sore on a highway. People have been removed but you find a market on a public road and nobody can touch them because it is politically not correct to tell those people to move away from public road and go and do their business in the main market so that the road can be used for what it was designed. You find a lot of such. Even we eulogized the late John Michuki it brings to some of those issues we shared when he made decisions that public assets had to be protected and it is important that people must move. He never stood back to ask what are the political implications of making this decision one way or the other. It is like, “Yes, if it is the right thing to do, let us do it”. I would want to see a Land Commission that would restore sanity on our land so that if anyone is sitting on public land; be it a public park, public forest or public road, this Commission will be given the teeth within this House to make that decision and we support them so that public land is restored as public land. What is private is then protected as private land. Nobody would want to see at the back of your garden somebody coming and putting up a kiosk or somebody coming and saying, “From now on, where you park your car, I will also be putting up my temporary sector”. Similarly we should collectively be guarding what belongs to all of us and saying nobody should come and take away from all of us and our children and their children the right to use that land that has been reserved as Uhuru Park or the land that has been reserved as Karura Greenery. Some people want to make political capital by using it as assets to make money and take it to a bank to siphon money off NSSF and all the other bodies for purposes of electioneering. These are things we need to safeguard and we hope that when we now set up this National Land Commission the men and women who we are going to put in that Commission will be people of high integrity who will take on the challenge knowing where we are coming from as a county; knowing that people have shed their blood to protect this land, knowing that all the fights we have seen has been to do with land. they will now bring back that sanity, give us that hope and by the time we come to the elections later this year or at whatever point it will be and subsequent elections land will never be a reference point because people will be seeing we have an institutional framework that guarantees us our rights as enshrined in the Constitution that what is your is yours is yours. You have rights to own property anywhere in the county and there is an institutional body that protects that for you and that you can now move with your investment to whichever county you want to settle in now and into the future with that guarantee. Once you have those guarantees peace will be sustained in this country. It will not be based on political configurations that guarantee peace, but the law that will guarantee the peace of the people anywhere in the country. This is as opposed to politicians forming up one political configuration or another at the guise of guaranteeing the peace of our people in future. It should be a guarantee in the Constitution and the law and not something that will be based on some political bargaining that could collapse if that political bargain is not met one way or the other. I believe that we shall be on the right track once we put this framework in place."
}