I cannot recall when I last saw such an expertly executed piece of PR designed to demonstrate that a new government is “inclusive”.
The coastal tour by President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto was not only a masterpiece of public relations, but was also sound politics: politicians who had firmly rejected the ruling Jubilee coalition suddenly found that they really had no choice but to profusely thank the president for this majestic gesture of making an estimated 60,000 title deeds immediately available to the indigenous residents of coast province.
Why are title deeds such an emotive issue at the coast? Well, there is a fundamental difference between having no title to land at the coast; and having no title elsewhere in the republic.
Take the Nyanza region for example; the one place possibly more militant in its opposition to the Jubilee coalition than the coast:
The average citizen of those parts is a small scale farmer – same as the coast. But if the Nyanza farmer complains of having a “land problem” what he is likely to be referring to is a quarrel with his neighbours over property boundaries. Or maybe it is a dispute between family members as to what portion of land should be inherited by whom. In any event, it is unlikely to be about the prospect of eviction by strangers.
But at the coast, a “land problem” has historically taken the form of the arrival of bulldozers to raze a large urban shanty town, or an entire village somewhere in the rural areas. And in each case, the justification for this would be that someone else held legal title to this land.
For example, it could be that back in the early days of colonial rule, the Sultan of Zanzibar had sold that land to a “white settler” for the establishment of a coconut plantation – and the land had since changed hands repeatedly over 70 years or so, until at last, it was owned by the man who had now sent in the bulldozers.
Alternatively, it may have been "unadjudicated public land" that these coastal farmers had lived on for decades. Here too, the title deed would somehow end up in the hands of some "Nairobi tycoon" who would promptly arrange for their eviction.
So, it was a great day for the coast when those title deeds were handed out – especially as this is supposed to be just the beginning of such distributions of land titles.
But here is the thing: we soon enough learned that the bulk of those title deeds given out, had in fact been gathering dust in land registries all around the region, for many years. This reveals one thing worth noting; and also raises a question.
The thing worth noting is that these title deeds cannot be for those coastal people most at risk of eviction. They are for those who actually have the land legally registered in their names, only they have never up to now obtained the title deeds. So for those most at risk, the "land problem" continues.
The question it all raises is, why did these people whose title deeds have been lying about for ages, not go out and collect them? After all, there have been many occasions when coast lands officers have made appeals to beneficiaries of government settlement schemes at the coast, pointing out that there were hundreds of title deeds in their registries which had yet to be collected.
Well, the answer is that the government does levy a charge on the processing of such valuable documents (stamp duty, registration fees etc); charges which were apparently waived in this recent case.
The amount varies with the value of the land under consideration; but in any event you cannot hope to obtain your title without a sum of KES 10,000/- or so in officially-receipted payments. And that of course is the point: many small scale farmers at the coast cannot afford to part with such a sum.
As I have argued before in this column, the primary goal of any national or regional development plan, has to be that of raising millions from agrarian poverty, to some kind of regular income, whether through paid employment, or through more profitable farming.
The coast region lacks value-adding food processing factories which would make local crops like coconuts and cashewnuts and cassava more profitable to grow. And the real problem at the coast is not really lack of land titles, but abject poverty.
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