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{
    "id": 641741,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/641741/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 207,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Waiganjo",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2644,
        "legal_name": "John Muriithi Waiganjo",
        "slug": "john-muriithi-waiganjo"
    },
    "content": "extremely wealthy with huge tracts of land and ranches. Any law that we make relating to land must mind this section of the people. We cannot legislate on matters land and leave out squatters, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and people who are forcefully evicted from their land either because of political or traditional reasons. It is also a good time to debate about land inheritance and the people who have lost land because of certain cultural practices. We know for instance, for a long time women were not supposed to inherit land and that was the law traditionally. We also know that after modernizing our laws we have women being people who do not only have land but cannot even inherit land. It is still the same situation in some of our cultural practices. Women can still not own land. Within this Bill one of the institutions that we must caution and enable to work is the NLC. It is a constitutional Commission and the framers of the Constitution deliberately put that Commission there because of seeing how matters land had been dealt with before. There was a lot of patronage of land, dishing of land and even outright theft and land grabbing. I would like the mandate of NLC to be protected and even while saying that this Commission may have been cannibalized by narrow selfish interests and probably taking sides in matters political. I think NLC is one Commission that we need to protect and allow it to work within its mandate. We do not want a situation where we revert, to the old system of dealing with land. We have a constitutional Commission that has been well thought-out by Kenyans and has been put in place by the framers of the Constitution which was voted for by Kenyans. The other problem I see in this Bill is that it does not come out clearly to state what to do with the landless. We are cooking a pot but a section of our society is out there just looking for this cake and we are not giving them an entry point. We are talking about land and a quarter or third of our population is landless and we are not talking about them. We are talking about land as a unit of production. At the same time we do have informal settlements. People who are living in villages and slums and do not have hope on earth to ever own a roof over their heads. We are debating but we are not providing for them. One of the reasons why lawlessness and disorder come into play is when you ignore a huge section of the population. You proceed to make laws for the rich and forget that others are also entitled to land. It is not enough to classify land as community land or private land. Those are good ideas. However, we are not talking about the squatters, people living in the slums and people who are living on land that they have lived on for many years. There is a practice in this country where one puts somebody on his or her land because he or she is an absentee landlord. He or she puts a family on his or her land to take care of it and then he or she retreats to the city. The family lives there for more than 12 years and he or she still calls that land his or hers. Even if those people had an opportunity to obtain advance possession of that land, they would need legal processes to stake a claim on that land. Even as we debate this law, it is important to have in mind people who we know need land so that we can bring about equality in wealth and ownership of land. Land means home for some people. Even as I support this Land Laws (Amendment) Bill, I wish to see various amendments to this piece of legislation that will make land tenure in Kenya a completely new regime."
}