News on Land

A court in northern Vietnam’s Hoa Binh province on Wednesday sentenced land-rights activist Can Thi Theu and her son Trinh Ba Tu to eight years in prison each for posting online articles and livestream videos criticizing the government for its handling of a deadly land-rights clash last year.

The eight-year terms for the pair, who worked to raise awareness of the socially and politically explosive issue of land grabs in the country of 95 million people, will be followed by three years each on probation, the court’s judgment said.

Current estimates of land-use change may be capturing only one-quarter of its true extent across the world, new research shows.

Medici Land Governance (MLG) has partnered with the Government of Rwanda to pilot a project that aims to make land transfers a paperless process. For the pilot, MLG has built a land transaction platform on blockchain called Ubutaka, which will be integrated with Rwanda’s existing land registry infrastructure.

7,500 families have been saved from mass evictions by Kenya Defence Forces 78 Battalion.

A report by Nation on Sunday, May 16, indicated that KDF was stopped from carrying out further evictions on the 17,000-acre parcel of land located in Tigania East, Meru County.

The freeze orders were issued by the Land and Environment Court in a case filed by 13 of the victims.

The team moved to court at the beginning of May to protest the move by KDF to take over the parcel arguing at the time that the battalion had begun the process of evicting residents.

The private sector has been commended for their contribution to import substitution through the escalation of the growing of oil palm.

Early this year the world commemorated the International Day of Forests, with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) joining Uganda to reiterate their commitment to restoring forests and degraded lands, as well as calling for action to reduce deforestation.

Background
The call for forest restoration and better management of the ecosystem was made during a high level national dialogue organised jointly by FAO, the European Union, Sweden and the Ministry of Water and Environment.

A court has dismissed case filed by loss-making East African Portland Cement Company challenging recommendations of the Ndung'u Land Commission Report on inquiry into the illegal and irregular allocation of public land.

In the report released 17 years ago, the Commission recommended revocation of titles allocated to the cement maker for 22 land parcels in Machakos and Kajiado counties.

A mineral water company Hema Beverages has run to court in a case in which it seeks to recover Shs216m from a real estate cum land seller.

Hema Beverages claims it was defrauded in a land deal after it later discovered that the land they had paid for had already been sold.  

NUR-SULTAN -- Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has signed into law a long-debated and sensitive bill that bans selling and leasing agricultural land to foreigners in the oil-rich Central Asian state.

Parliament has questioned payment of Sh73 million to the National Intelligence Service (NIS) for an electronic land system that President Uhuru Kenyatta launched last month.

MPs put Lands Principal Secretary Nicholas Muraguri to task to explain why the spy agency was tapped to develop the Land Information Management System (LIMS).

The National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) demanded to know why the ministry received Sh73 million from the Ministry of ICT for the development of LIMS wired the cash to NIS.

Construction of the Lokichar to Lamu crude oil pipeline whose implementation was set for 2020 will be delayed until the end of the year due to land acquisition issues.

The 820km pipeline, which is a key component of the Sh2.5 trillion Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transport (Lappset) corridor project, is facing challenges related to land compensation.

Hundreds of families who were left homeless after the demolition of houses in Kinango Sub-county, Kwale County on Friday last week, are now appealing to the government to help them repossess their land from a private developer.

The 200 families’ from Mwamdudu in Bonje area are accusing a private developer of colluding with top government officials and other unscrupulous individuals to grab their ancestral land.