This archive report was first published on 11 September 2019.
On September 11, 2019, a lands officer testified in a Keroka Court that the Kisii Lands Registry office was plagued by corruption, with cases of land fraud facilitated until a few years ago.
Steve Mokaya, the county's Lands Registrar, revealed that various cases of land fraud were enabled at the registrar's office until he took over. His testimony sparked a petition to Lands CS Farida Karoney to investigate the matter further.
"There are other cases of fraud which we have been involved in but as we are speaking a serious cleaning is going on and soon, the department's dealings will be online and such misdeeds will have been eliminated," Mokaya told the magistrate.
The case in question involved two suspects charged with creating a land transfer document to take away a parcel of land belonging to orphaned children in Masimba, Kisii county.
The lands officer confirmed that the title deed in question was not properly obtained, with the Lands Board Consent letter used to process it being invalid.
Chief Inspector Daniel Gutu, a government document examiner, had previously testified that the signatures of the administrator of the parcel and a witness in a land sale agreement were forged.
The magistrate had ordered the arrest and prosecution of the lands officer involved in processing the forged title deed during a previous hearing session in June.
