The Lands Ministry has given notice, through a proposed amendment to the Land Registration Act, that it wishes to have its public complaints office anchored in law. A special issue of the Kenya Gazette dated 23^rd March 2020 introduces an amendment Bill whose principal object is to establish an office of a Complaints Reviewer. The memorandum of objects and reasons for the Bill, forwarded through the Leader of Majority Party in Parliament Hon Aden Duale, provides that the office shall be responsible for providing a free, effective and impartial complaints review mechanism at the Lands Registry and Survey of Kenya. This complaints resolution mechanism will apply to complaints relating to land registration services under the Land Registration Act, and also to surveying services offered under the Survey Act. The amendment will occasion additional expenditure of public funds.

This Bill has got the industry talking. And this is healthy! Land Bills headed to Parliament call for serious attention, particularly by landowners, land professionals and business folk, as they often spell new ways of holding tenure rights or transacting business on land. As always, such bills will have two sides. So what are pundits threading from this Bill? One side posits that life in offices of the Lands Ministry has never been easy. Frustrations bedevil service seekers in land registries and survey offices as they are sent through faceless technical officers usually not available to listen and resolve their concerns. And when they talk, complainants are left overwhelmed with technical mumble for which they need interpretation. Yet, the legal consequences to their concerns could be dire.

So with time Ardhi House introduced a public complaints office as a friendlier intervention to help resolve routine complaints. The office has been in operation for many years; I recall discussing it in the Sunday Nation in 2011. It provided a good clearing hub for all manner of complaints including land invasions, double allocation, disenfranchisement by shrewd officers, dispossession of leases and land grabbing. And members of the public seemed quite happy with it, perhaps evidence that it fulfills some need.

But the Bill faces opposition too. First, it is not clear how the new amendments proposed for the Land Registration Act will have effect on functions spelt under the Survey Act. For the proposed Complaints Reviewer to be able to address complaints on surveying services, then the Survey Act would need to be separately amended to anchor it as well. This is not so.

Secondly, the office of the Chief Land Registrar and that of the Director of Survey have broad powers to deal with all manner of issues arising from the discharge of their functions. Each has discretion to establish working mechanisms and desks for efficient service delivery, including the resolution of technical and non-technical complaints. Furthermore, we now have the Lands Secretary, the National Land Commission, the Ombudsman and the Environment and Land Court. At county level, the County land offices have officers in charge, with powers to coordinate the running of the technical and administrative activities in the offices. The County survey offices, formerly District Survey offices, have similar arrangements. So the counter view is that we have more than enough offices to resolve both technical and non-technical issues in the Lands Ministry offices if entrusted officers worked well. Indeed, it is observed that the statutory introduction of the office of a Complaints Reviewer is not only likely to overlap the roles of existing offices, but is also unjustifiable commitment of public funds.

The buck to all this stops with Parliament. And much as we have the current Covid-19 challenge, stakeholders seized of either of the perspectives must codify their views and present their memorandums to Parliament before the Lands Committee sits to consider the Bill. This will enable Parliament to make an objective decision