LDGI score card tracks impact of reforms

Kenya’s quest for land reforms was partly informed by public frustrations while seeking services in Lands offices. In trying to track the impact of the reforms to business done in these offices, the Land Development and Governance Institute has undertaken periodic surveys to gauge public perceptions on the services provided particularly in the Land Registries. The surveys focus on service seekers who are also sought for opinion on changes that can be made to improve services in the offices serving them.

Suggestions have been practical and varied, aimed at raising the attention of senior and middle level managers in the Ministry. Significantly, they are pretty simple and implementing them calls for little or no extra money. To help the Ministry harness the suggestions, the Institute shares the highlights with the Lands Ministry Cabinet Secretary, parliament and other pertinent state offices. From recent surveys, there’s evidence that some actions have been taken, though small scale, to implement some of the suggestions. This is commendable and should be sustained. It’s hoped that the new Cabinet Secretary, Prof Jacob Kaimenyi, in partnership with the Land Commission, will progressively implement most given the importance of land transactions to national development and regular business in Kenya.

Consumer suggestions for improvement of services

A brief highlight of the key suggestions would be good for national awareness. The surveys continue to affirm that simple short term interventions would go a long way towards improving services. Overall, the surveys reveal that it is the actions such as transforming staff attitudes towards customer service and ensuring easy access to land information and products that would most fulfill customers.

Customers in Lands offices would want to find reliable and consistently attended customer care desks to provide information on the kinds, costs and locations of officers offering specific services in an office. This information would help to reduce their enquiry and waiting time. They would also want to see brokers, who confuse them and introduce barriers between them and officers in order to earn a fee, kept off these offices. Identification tags or uniforms, such as branded overcoats, would also help to easily distinguish government officials from brokers.

In addition, service seekers have suggested that senior officers from Ardhi House should be making sporadic inspection visits to county land offices in order to reduce incidents of lateness and absence from office, laxity and corruption. In some offices, officers have been noted to report quite late or leave very early while in others, lunch breaks are extended for far too long while customers wait in frustration. In this regard, there have been suggestions that officers in charge of county Land offices should be obliged to do regular beats within their offices in order to minimise such practice. There should be also be introduced a mechanism to enforce the timelines stipulated for the provision of various services in the Ministry’s service charter.

In order to cultivate a culture of integrity and commitment to customer needs, suggestions have been made that newly recruited and continuing officers should be taken through structured induction and transformative management courses. Other administrative interventions suggested include the regular transfer of staff in order to reduce the possibilities of long-serving officers playing patron to broker cartels and pre-empting a business-as-usual attitude to service provision in any one station.

Limitations that beg executive attention

But there are also genuine limitations observed at the service level which need specific executive attention. These include insufficient technical staff, congestion in offices, poor storage facilities, lack of official stationery and basic equipment. These call for simple extension or re-arrangement of office facilities in some cases. Branded official stationery such as forms for applications for transaction approvals to land control boards, letters of consent, blank title deeds and green cards among others, which have been reported out of stock in many land registries from time to time, must never be allowed to run out of supply. Shortage of such stationery has limiting implications to customer service and revenue collection. Basic equipment such as computers and photocopiers should be availed in offices.

Though expensive, concerns raised on the need for provision of sufficient numbers of technical staff such as registrars, surveyors and valuers need to be addressed in the Ministry’s medium and long term training strategies while the digitization of records and the computerization of technical processes, including the use of e-payments as is now happening in the Nairobi Registry, need to be prioritized in the immediate and medium term.

Ibrahim Mwathane (Chairman, Land Development and Governance Institute, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it / This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , www.ldgi.org)

Write up prepared for the Daily Nation and published on Monday 1st February 2016