It is hard to get lost in London nowadays.
GPS can tell you what side of the road you are on. If you miss it come to
Kibera and I will get you lost within 15 minutes. Another place where you can
easily get lost in Kenya is anywhere flat in Nyanza Province. This is what
happened to me while trying to walk from Lwak village to Kamito in Asembo. I
had two hours to kill before I needed to be in Kamito and although the boda
boda drivers couldn’t understand what I was doing I turned down their
invitations to join them on the back of their bike in favour of the
well-trodden path.
When you get off the road, Nyanza is a maze
of millions of one acre farms all interconnected with non-sequitur paths and
hedgerows; a washing place here, a thatched hut there and every so often the
moo of a cow that ambushes you from behind. When you can see your destination
in the distance you have a hope of reaching it, even though you might well be
put off course by a surprise swamp or a ploughed field which is keen not to be
disturbed. When it is flat you have no hope.
Even though they were not used to seeing an odiero wandering around
shambas asking for directions, there was no element of hostility from the Luo’s
who plot by plot guided me to Kamito. For my part I was not used to asking
which tree or plume of smoke I should aim for as my next landmark – something
they are probably quite accustomed to.
However, underneath the surface a lack of
trust and a fear of letting go means farmers such as these are facing
increasing levels of poverty. Most farmers in Nyanza are subsistence farmers
who generate extra income by selling excess harvest and working on neighbouring
farms in peak season. Therefore for many their only tangible asset is their
land, yet often there is nothing on paper that gives them the right to that
land. In traditional Luo culture, a chief or ‘weg lowo’ would act as patron to
large areas of land that had diverse soil types and terrains and he would lease
it out to families who wanted to specialise in working that kind of terrain –
often the terms for the these leases could be in the form of livestock or
labour. In the 1950’s after many centuries of long term leases an unpaid
adjudication committee was set up to register land to one individual or another
and naturally the winners in such a system were the ones who could provide the
biggest informal payment to the committee. As a result many farmers decided not
to alert land transactions to the committee and just conducted deals amongst
themselves. After a short time the registered title deeds fell out of sync with
local understanding of who owned what land.
As Kenya modernised, this disparity created
more and more opportunities for exploitation. People used the committees to
acquire title deeds for land which they were not occupying and blamed the
disorganisation of the system if there were any complaints. When there weren’t
complaints these title deeds could be used as collateral on a loan, or even
sold to multiple buyers at once in front of different members of the
committees. By the mid 1980’s, when corruption in Kenya was at a peak, very few
subsistence farmers trusted the title deed system at all, and over time there
was a campaign for recognition of ‘customary ownership’ of land, enabling the
potential for complications to increase further. By the end of 2012, up to 75 per cent of landin Kenya was unregistered
Although not fool-proof, the safest way of
holding rights over inherited land is to occupy it. This does not just mean
farm it, but also live on it and bury your dead in it. In traditional culture,
each son must build his own hut in the compound while still a teenager, and
then when he marries he should set up his own compound outside the perimeter of
his father’s space. Within two generations, 25 houses may have been built
around the original one, constituting a mini village. The maze I stumbled upon
was effectively several of these mini villages which over time have merged
together to form a mega shamba complex. This could be OK if all the gardens and
small fields could be used efficiently, but often the open space is actually a
dedicated burial ground for the ancestors.
The consequence of this over-population of
the rural areas of Kenya has led to massive migration to Nairobi (I havewritten before about why they come to Nairobi instead of other cities).
However, this is not helping to develop Nyanza which still lags far behind most
other provinces. For example, Nyanza is the province with the highestprevalence of HIV, domestic violence, and child mortality, and 63% of the population are living in poverty.
Nyanza is not famous for having the most
productive land in Kenya, but if farmed efficiently it has potential to feed
the whole region. It is not possible to
farm the land efficiently if it is becoming more and more congested with huts
and graveyards. People need to congest their living quarters into centralised
areas (such as towns) and common burial grounds need to be allocated at
affordable prices. As part of co-operatives or larger private businesses,
workers commute daily to work in the fields from this urbanised location, which
in itself becomes an opportunity for new businesses, services and general
economic development. Meanwhile the land can provide anywhere between 5 – 20 times
the crop it yielded when farmed inefficiently with poor resources. Of course,
this is not a new argument and I am no expert in it so I will not discuss it
further, but anyone in the ‘peasant romantic’ wing should read this blog by
Duncan Green and consider that the land reform I am referring to is a model that was adopted
across the industrialised world, starting with Sweden in the 1700’s. (see)
For this land reform to occur, title deeds
will need to be exchanged, and/or people will need to be happy to not live on
and bury their dead in the land that they own. This is something that was
recognised in Kenya’s vision 2030, completed in 2008, and elevated in the new constitution
of 2010. It was for this reason that the constitution stipulated the
establishment of a strong independent commission that would wipe the slate
clean on land rights and clarify the rights of land-owners. (http://www.klrc.go.ke/index.php/constitution-of-kenya/117-chapter-five-land-and-environment/part-1-land/234-67-national-land-commission)
Its independence was a vital attribute as land grabbing had been clearly associated
with the politicians who were closest to the ministry of lands and it was seen
that ending the corruption could not be done from the inside.
This suggestion was supported a few weeks
ago when an independent audit was called without warning for the Ministry of Lands.
The independent audit found no less than one million files that had mysteriously
disappeared while on the same day staff from the ministry were caught and
arrested for sneaking title deeds out of the building. But to be strong is just as vital an attribute.
The National Land Commission has pledged to create three million title deeds
for Kenyans in the next five years, and these title deeds must be undisputed
and unduplicated.
The NLC has said that to be strong it needs
a budget of Sh14.8 billion, but instead it was given just Sh 779 million. For
this it has to rely on the Ministry of Lands that administers the budget.
Despite considering themselves their ‘mother ministry’, Ministry of Lands
insists that the NLC should no longer operate within Ardhi House and should not
be overstepping its mandate but issuing title deeds but should exist to offer advice to the ministry and offer other roles delegated by the government. This has led to a stand-off
and increasing delays in the issuance of title deeds.
The recent war between the National Land
Commission and the Ministry of Lands (above) shows that this administration does not
want the NLC to be strong, and in effect this means that they are less
interested in pursuing Vision 2030 than increasing their own power. To make
this point clearer, the president paid a visit to the ministry in what was
slated as a sign of solidarity with the minister Charity Ngilu. This stance will
ensure that Nyanza and other congested rural areas of Kenya will remain poor
with all the effects that come with it.
In her chapter on land reform in her book ‘The
Challenge for Africa’, Wangari Maathai writes this: ‘I would like to see not
poor farmers scrambling to produce tea or cassava on a piece of land that long
ago lost its productivity, but rather cooperatives that provide farmers with
accurate and timely information about their crops… The government will need to
make a commitment to rooting out corruption in parastatal agencies that further
exploit and impoverish small farmers.’ She did not live to see it, and it is still a
long way off, but it will never happen in Kenya if the National Land Commission
is not strong and independent.