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{
    "id": 625304,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/625304/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 160,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Ganya",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 18,
        "legal_name": "Francis Chachu Ganya",
        "slug": "francis-ganya"
    },
    "content": "and absolutely not clear. The Bill defines “community” as an organised group. Any group of people can go somewhere, form an organisation of some kind and claim their community land. We want to see a very clear definition of what “community” is. We feel ethnicity is a major attribute in defining a community. As Members of PPG caucus, “community” means a consciously distinct and organised group of users of community land who share, among others, some few attributes like common ancestry, similar culture or unique mode of livelihood, ethnicity, geographical space or geological space, socio-economic or any other common interest. Another issue that I have with this Bill is Clause 4 under interpretation where the word “vest” is used in conferring ownership of community land. I feel the word “vest” has some element which is temporal and also of trusteeship. We want to see clear ownership of this land because the Constitution is not ambiguous. The Constitution clearly envisages absolute ownership of community land by the local communities who live there. To do away with that ambiguity, we want the word “own” to be used instead of the word “vest”. It means a lot. It could just be a three letter word, but if you look at the substance of ownership of land, we feel that community land should be owned by the communities who live there, but not vested in them. Clause 7 deals with registration of communities. This Bill proposes the registration of community land in accordance with the law relating to societies as it is today. We feel that the existing legislative framework for registering land is very limited and it would not carry the spirit and the letter of the Constitution when it comes to ownership of community land. The Constitution clearly states that it should be owned by the communities and not by any level of Government; either the national Government or county governments. This is very important to us. I suggest that every community land should be registered in body corporate. People of North Horr, wherever they live, should have the right to register their land in corporate form either as the Community at large, communities which live in Illiret or as a location or an entity, but can never be as stated in this Bill. Clauses 15 and 16 deal with institutional framework to manage community land. This Bill gives that role to the Cabinet Secretary to make regulations for administration of community land. Instead we strongly feel that the Bill should provide for local communities structures and we intend to propose this amendment. The community structure will be instrumental in providing guidance under extension of land in day to day administration of community land. The community structure that we have in mind, among others, is the community assembly, which is very important. I am not talking about county assemblies, but community assemblies where every community will have an assembly which will be an ultimate organ to make decisions whenever they want to use their land in any form or even dispose it. For day to day management, we also feel that community land registration board will be very critical so that we can have a committee in place, but which gets it mandate from the entire community and the community assembly, as a structure, will have a role of ratifying the decisions of this committee to ensure transparency and accountability. Clause 6 deals with the role of the county government in unregistered community land. This is very important to us. The Bill proposes that unregistered community land will be held in trust by the county government. However, the Bill is not clear what can be done by this county government during that period. To register all this land, for instance in North Horr which is 8 per cent of Kenya’s land mass, will take a lot of time and definitely will be tasking and for a long period, unregistered community land will be under the county government. During this period, The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}