Ringleader of Nairobi land invasions charged with Sh1b land forgery – Weekly Citizen

A former chief of Kayole in Nairobi Alexander Hoops Shihemi has been charged with forgery of ownership documents intended to fraudulently acquire land situated in Donholm Nairobi valued at Sh944 million.

Hoops has been the ringleader and mastermind of landgrabbing cartels that have been fronting as self-help groups, whose sole and only purpose is to grab land, and have over time caused havoc in Eastlands area of Nairobi. They have been using fake allocation letters/title documents that cannot be supported by any records at the lands registry.

Their illegal activities have now been investigated by DCI, leading the arrest of three other ringleaders of the gangs namely Patrobas Awino, Peter Gitau Muiruri and Peter Njoroge Kanika who have already been arraigned in court and remanded at Industrial Area Remand Prison.

In the charge sheets the DCI has provided documents to show that they fraudulently prepared title documents in attempt to illegally acquire the property belonging to Gidjoy Investments Ltd. Mr Alexander Hoops is notably the former chief for Kayole. The activities of the self-styled self-help groups was first exposed by the former chairman National Land Commission in a report to OCPD Buruburu in April of last year, when it disowned ‘’NLC resolutions’’ purporting to award prime parcels of land to selfhelp groups in Nairobi. NLC had dismissed the letters, on whose strength two self-help groups were laying claim to land ownership, as forgeries.

A former senior chief of Kayole in Nairobi Shihemi
Hoops Alexander arraigned at the Milimani Law
Courts on Monday 7 October 2019 charged with
forgery of ownership documents intended to
fraudulently acquire land situated in Donholm
Nairobi valued at Sh944 million.

The Embakasi, Savanna, Donholm areas of Nairobi have for close to two decades been plagued by landgrabbing cartels whose modus operadi entailed gathering local villagers to invade any undeveloped space without reference to who the genuine owners may be and pose as needy squatters, who were then coached how to form a “self-help group’’ and demand that they be allocated the land by the Nairobi City Council. It is against this background that numerous so-called self-help groups in the larger Embakasi area hold some form of “certificates of allocation’’ of land that includes dodgy determinations purportedly issued by the NLC.

The recent escalation in land prices in Nairobi has only added fuel to the activities of these cartels, who are faceless individuals who spare no expense to do whatever it takes to penetrate, influence and manipulate key institutions involved in land management to help them disinherit the genuine owners of the land.

Property owners in this part of Nairobi have for many years had to contend with unending waves of invasions by ‘professional squatters’ usually mobilised by well-heeled wheeler-dealers eyeing other people’s property.

A more recent case that comes to mind was the protracted 10-year ownership tussle pitting a group that is linked to developers of the Greenspan estate and a self-help group named Alfajiri Self Help Group over prime land located in Donholm Nairobi worth over Sh1 billion.

Delivering her judgment in this dispute ELC Case No 313 of 2008, Justice Kossy Bor of the Environment and Land Court ruled that the Sauti Sacco Society Limited was the owner of the parcel of land 82/4264, a block from which a portion was hived and sold to Greenspan Developers Limited. The court further ruled that the suit property was private land and ceased to exist when it was subdivided into two blocks, noting that Alfajiri Self Help Group cannot lay claim to private property it never owned. In law, selfhelp groups do not even have legal capacity to own land