The government Thursday pledged to address the pending issues derailing land transactions within the next 60 days.
This comes ahead of planned protests by lawyers over the delays on Friday, January 20.
Law Society of Kenya (LSK) plans to march to Adhi House on Friday to protest the alleged inefficiency of the online platform which was launched in April 2021.
Principal Secretary for the State Department of Lands and Physical Planning Nixon Korir said the backlog at the Ministry of Lands has held over Sh100 billion worth of transactions which they hope to clear even as the ministry also fast-tracks the process of digitizing all land records through the Ardhi Sasa platform.
When it was launched in April 2021, the National Land Information Management System popularly known as Ardhi Sasa, was meant to eliminate the long queues at Ardhi House and cases of land fraud.
The implementation of the online platform however seems to be facing a myriad of challenges.
LSK President Erick Theuri said landowners bear the biggest brunt of the inefficiencies.
“There is a lot of pain, we know of landowners who have passed on because they were waiting for a charge to be registered for the bank to release a loan to enable them access treatment out of the country,” said Theuri.
The lawyers will stage peaceful protests across its eight branches countrywide to petition the Ministry of Lands to expedite the implementation of recommendations that are meant to improve service delivery.
A statement by the LSK Chief Executive Officer Florence Muturi said the recommendations were arrived at after a series of meetings between the lawyers’ umbrella body, the Ministry of Lands, and the Institution of Surveyors of Kenya (ISK) failed to yield any fruits.
Korir, on his part, stated: “I spoke to the President of LSK, Theuri, to try and understand the issues that they are raising and we are solving them right now…he insisted on delivering the memorandum with the team which I think is Okay, we will receive the memorandum and work on the issues.”
According to the PS, the Ministry of Lands is keen on reducing the backlog of land transactions in the next two months.
“Within the next two months we want to unlock thousands of transactions that have been lagging behind so that we can allow Kenyans to transact, to charge their property, to develop, to sell their property, to lease,” said Korir.
The PS also stated that the crisis at the Nairobi registry will be resolved in the next six months, a period within which it hopes to finalize the digitization process.
“We are now auditing the system and we should be able to fix all the issues that are related to the system so that within the next six months we should be able to have fully digitized Nairobi so that we can move to the next counties,” noted Korir.
LSK wants the adoption of a hybrid system until the ministry addresses all the emerging challenges.