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{
    "id": 625948,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/625948/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 602,
    "type": "other",
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "together and bought land collectively and then they have subdivide that land, the space left for social amenities like schools, hospitals and roads are encroached. So, how do you also ensure transfer from the beneficial community to those who may want to develop such social amenities without corruption? Most of the land that we speak of, even in terms of expanding Nairobi, growing our cities and moving forward our agricultural system is largely within communities. We need to ensure that this Bill also speaks to the issue of civic education so that we can educate our communities in terms of how they can manage their land collectively. I am also drawn to the issue of people managing forests, like in the case of many communities in Lamu. I am also drawn to the fact that people do not have title deeds. Does it mean that somebody who acquires a piece of paper is, therefore, able to remove communities that had their ancestry there? Can we as a Parliament create, as a form of social justice, a way in which validity of such documents can be questioned based on history? Is there a way we can create a procedure, either in the mother law or through regulations, to ensure that communities are not deprived of their possessions? This will ensure that we do not have absentee landlords. The other issue that also comes out is renewal of leases of community land. We need to address whether community land needs to be under leasehold or freehold. This is because one of the ways in which communities are being deprived of their land is through renewal of their leases. We need to ensure that this law speaks to that so that we do not also end up with communities who have invested in some property but end up losing. The other thing we also need to look at is land ownership by our primary schools. It is only recently that schools are acquiring titles. That is to mean a lot of this land, if it were to be grabbed or subdivided by the Boards of Management or the head teachers of those schools or any other powerful actor within that locality, the communities may not have some form of recourse. That speaks to our history; it speaks to the fact before land was being given verbally. A clear example is Kenyatta University (KU). The land in Kamae was given to people by the first President. Now, Swazuri has said the land belongs to KU. How do you get justice for such an issue? On one hand there is an actor who was the President, and on the other hand there is a Government institution. How do you cure such anomaly that is not a function of the community? It is not the community itself that has generated itself to be in such a precarious situation. The other issue that also needs to be clearly addressed by this Bill is that of land acreage. What is the minimum land acreage that a community can hold? Sometimes you cannot hold development and say that because a community owns a piece of land for pasture within a developing environment, it should continue to be like that because the change of land use also comes into place. Those are issues we need to address to ensure that there is maximum use of land. We know that land matters are emotive. A majority of us buy plots measuring about an eighth of an acre. Nobody can silence you in this town, but there are people who are just holding land for speculation purposes. That also leads to another issue. What about the issue of community land for personal gain in terms of collateral when seeking for capital for investment so that when members of the community want to use that land for their own benefit, they are informed about the caveat? Maybe they cannot take loans because somebody has already used the title to do so. There are so many grey areas in this Bill. Even the very act of defining ‘community land’ is tricky. How is a community defined? Are we talking about ethnicity? Are we talking about a small society of people who have come together to buy a piece of land? How do you protect people from being defrauded of their share certificates and their land being sold to 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."
}