Lands ministry sets up legal committees to manage digital registry transition » Capital News

NAIROBI, Kenya Jul 3 – The Ministry of Lands has set up legal committees which will aid in determining land ownership wrangles emerging from the planned transition of the current manual lands records to a digital land registry.

Land Cabinet Secretary Faridah Karoney said the legal teams while help in sorting out ownership status of public land which may have been irregularly allocated and cases where by the ownership of land parcels across the country is undocumented.

“This process will lead to a lot of disputes, because for three reason, first there are many parcels of land in Nairobi with more than one title. We intend to use the process as a means to determine the real owner. We will look at the development plan that established that parcel, we will look at survey plan and then we go to land admin for the correspondences. If all this documents tie, we will this is a legitimate title.”

“But we have found in the process of cleaning this records up is that there are many Title Deeds which hang in the air, -like it is suggest a Title Deed but it is based on nothing – so are the one we are setting aside and those are the ones we anticipate will cause a lot of disputes,” she explained on Thursday.

She was speaking when she briefed the Senate ICT Committee chaired by Baringo Senator Gideon Moi on the ministry’s digitization efforts and status on delivery of digital services.

The Lands CS reiterated that computerization will reduce duplication in the storage of information and will make it possible to consolidate information while allowing the land registry to assess its performance and improve its services.

“The team that formed the system has very high end cyber security experts. The reason we did this, is that we can build the security architecture into the system to ensure the data in the system will be encrypted, similarly the data on transit will be encrypted, we have several layers of firewalls to make sure it is difficult to penetrate,” the CS told the committee.

Senator Moi and his Nakuru counterpart Susan Kihika proposed the ministry considers deploying other secure mechanisms such as Blockchain technology as it rolls-out the National Lands Information Management System (NLIMS).

“Are you going to use Blockchain, because that is the most secure in my humble opinion, that Blockchain is new perfect,” posed the Baringo Senator.

“From the team that is building the system, what we know is that we will enter Blockchain as a second phase. What we are doing now is building and encrypting several layers of security. I do not think outside the banks and system used by Ministry of Interior, there will a system to rival the one we are building,” CS Karoney stated.

She said the NLIMS has been developed by the cyber security experts from different cadres of government.

“The reason why we decided to have a totally Kenyan owned system, is so that we can have control, previously we have outsourced to other countries,  but now we are building a system that is will be monitored just the same way you have because we know the criminal will move from stealing files to attempting to do so digitally,” she said as she explained security features of the new system.