Lands PS Nixon Korir before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) committee at Bunge Towers, Parliament, Nairobi on August 4,2026. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]
Lawmakers have criticised the delayed digitisation of the Lands Management Information System, claiming that powerful individuals within the Ministry of Lands were frustrating the process to ensure corruption thrives.
MPs sitting in the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday claimed that despite the digitisation process being launched in April 2021, unnamed individuals from within the Ministry had seemingly colluded with owners with huge tracts of land to impede the implementation of the system, much to the chagrin of Kenyans.
This came on a day that the Lands Principal Secretary Nixon Korir announced that the government was intent on expending Sh16 billion for the full digitisation of the Lands system within a period of five years.
“As far as we lawyers are concerned, this digitisation process is being frustrated internally by those individuals who benefit from the lands process being manual. Because how do you explain that for the last six years we have been discussing this issue but the Ministry is yet to fully digitize the system?” posed Rarieda MP Otiende Amollo.
His sentiments came in the wake of an Auditor General report for the 2023/24 financial year that questioned the efficiency and effectiveness of the digital system on management of land administration. It revealed that out of the 83 land registries operated by the State Department of Lands, only two registries in Nairobi and Murang’a stations were fully digitised and migrated to the digital platform. It however noted that automation of services had been done for most processes within the State Department’s different modules.
Turkana Central MP Joseph Namuar subsequently pointed out that the delay in digitisation of the process had disadvantaged frontier counties such as Turkana which have what was previously referred to as trust land.
“Corruption thrives where land documents are not digitised. The process of attaining a hundred percent digitisation has stalled and we want to know why. You have to ask yourself, if this continues when will counties such as Turkana be at par with the rest of the country in terms of Service delivery,” posed Namuar.