Land, history and iniquity.

While I am still trying to figure out whether I should admit to Kwame Owino that I know nothing at all about anything of significance to do with poverty, let me expose my ignorance on something else entirely: land.

The Commission for the Implementation of the Constitution has published for public comment a legislative proposal (you think of them as "Bills") to give effect to Article 68(c)(i) of the Constitution on the minimum and maximum land holdings. The merits or otherwise of the legislative proposal will be known soon enough. What remains unclear is whether the enactment of the proposal into law will be a Magic Bullet to solve the myriad problems that bedevil the land sector in Kenya.

One way of describing industrialisation is the gradual transformation of an agriculture-based economy to a largely manufacturing-based economy. Sometimes this transformation is rapid; more often than not it is a decades' long process. Kenya's government's statistics indicate that its economy relies to a very great extent on agriculture and tourism. In the agriculture sector, the most valuable exports are horticultural produce (largely "cut" flowers and fruit), tea and coffee. In the tourism sector the most valuable patrons of the hotels lining our coast are foreigners, as are the attendees of national and international conferences held in Nairobi, Nakuru, Naivasha and Kisumu. Both sectors rely overwhelmingly on land, but more so in agriculture.

The history of agriculture policy in Kenya is the history of land, at least until 1963. It is striking that the same language employed by the settler community and the colonial government continues to pervade public policy-making in the twenty-first, independent century. It is almost as if the policies, and the legislative proposals designed to implement or enforce them, are still being drawn up by the men who built the Lunatic Railway to Uganda. That history is replete with discrimination and exclusion of those who were deemed incapable of dealing with that land profitably. It is why the same faces seem to occupy land in what is still defined as "high potential areas."

The ostensible policy objective of prescribing a maximum holding in these "high potential areas" is that a person who holds land in excess of the maximum will be compelled by various legislative, administrative and policy instruments to reduce his holding to the maximum recommended. The land that is surrendered as a result will be redistributed to families that did not possess land before. In turn, this redistribution will establish a "vibrant" land market and the prices paid for land parcels will reflect the true value of the land.

We shouldn't worry too much that Article 40 may scuttle the maximum land holding proposal; that one is likely to be superseded by Article 24 on the limitation of rights. Between 1963 and 1969, Kenya implemented the Million Acres Programme. It was meant to redistribute settler land to landless Kenyans. Forty five years later the reverberations of the swindles perpetrated in the name of the people through the settlement schemes are still being felt today, especially in the restive coast. I can see the new settlement schemes being modeled closely on the Million Acres Scheme.  The same iniquitous outcome is all but guaranteed.

The revised land law of Kenya has done little to encourage clarity in land administration; the current hot-then-cold war between the National Land Commission and Ardhi House is just one manifestation of the mes that is land administration. This legislative proposal does little to resolve this mess. Until the key stakeholders in land administration play a pro-landless role in the sector, we will still be talking about "challenges in the land sector" forty five years hence.