Outgoing Lands Cabinet Secretary Farida Karoney has refuted claims of irregular transfer of crucial documents at Ardhi House.
This follows earlier allegations by National Assembly Deputy Speaker Gladys Shollei that there was a scheme by Lands ministry officials to conceal certain information by transferring land transaction documents.
On her Twitter handle, Ms Shollei shared a video of people carting away documents from Ardhi House.
“Irregular and anomalous activities at Ardhi House today are of grave concern,” she tweeted.
“Movement of official documents in trucks by unknown persons, on a weekend, when the office is usually closed, should be investigated.”
However, the outgoing Lands CS dismissed the information circulating online as “incorrect”.
CS Karoney clarified that the exercise was part of the ongoing digitisation of records.
“There’s a lot of rumours online. I have seen a lot of posts and conversations. But those social media posts are not accurate,” she said, adding that a decision had been reached to move the hardcopy files for safe custody and pave the way for a digital lands registry.
Land transactions within Nairobi County, she explained, were now fully digital. Subsequently, a decision to remove the manual/hard copy files to safe custody has been taken by the government, paving the way for the digital land registry.
The digitisation, she said, is expected to ease title transfers and safeguard public land from grabbers.
“If you want any land transaction in Nairobi right now, you can get it in digital form,” she explained.
“All those records that were taken for safe custody have digital copies. They are in a platform called Electronic Document Management System from which you can now access all the files for Nairobi County,” she added.
“This is the culmination of a successful five-year journey to digitize the records at the Ministry of Lands,” Ms Karoney said.
From the department of registration, land administration, service, and physical planning, to evaluation, the government in 2018 decided to digitise operations at the Ministry of Lands.
Former president Uhuru Kenyatta last year launched the National Land Information Management System.
Since 1995, Ms Karoney said, there have been attempts at digitising the records at the Ministry of Lands, most of which have not been successful.
“Any transactions be they by professionals in the sectors of government or by land owners, all those records are now available digitally. Hence the decision to remove the manual files for safe custody,” CS Karoney told Nation.Africa.
“The 2018 phase was the first successful attempt at digitalizing operations at the Lands ministry,” she added.
President William Ruto on Saturday said that one of the strategic initiatives of his government is to digitise government services.
Kenya is making a case for African countries to digitise land records as a key reform agenda that will not only solve disputes but also enhance the continent’s tax base and administration processes. BY DAILY NATION