By Henry Jami Mang’eni
Only 63 per cent of Kenya’s land has a title, which makes it hard for farmers to buy land. However, if you are looking to buy private land with an official title, here is the journey I took to purchase 24 acres of farmland in Mwahera-Kilifi county.
The first step was to verify that the guy selling us the parcel of land was indeed its true owner. I got to the Kilifi County lands office next to Kilifi town police station at nine. Lands offices in every county can be found within each county’s government offices.
We got to the county government offices at nine in the morning and got instructions on where the land offices were. When we got there, we were first told to pay a Sh500 fee to a KCB till for an Application of Search Form. The receipt for this payment was stapled to a copy of the title, which we had been given by the mzee selling us the land. Once we handed over the copy of the title and the receipt, we were told we would have to wait a couple of minutes or even hours for them to go through their digital land records. We waited outside the office for half an hour, which is all the time we had to spare before both going to work, and checked back to see whether they had completed the search. Unfortunately, they hadn’t, and we told them we’d be back the following day for the results.
The following day, we again got to the offices at around nine and were informed that the title copy matched what was in their record, and the name of the landowner on their digital records was also that of the mzee selling us the land.
With that sorted, we moved on to the land buying process, which first meant finding a lawyer who has a background in land. For this, I went to Kilifi town the following week and walked around looking for any law-firm adverts, be they signboards or building signage. On the second floor of the building next to Equity Bank Kilifi, I saw a law firm advert. I went in and asked whether they handled land sales agreements, and they took me to the offices of the partner in the firm who handled land.
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The lawyer informed us that for the sale to proceed, he would prepare a sales agreement for the land, which would be signed by the seller and buyer of the land, both their witnesses and himself after the agreed upon price of the land had been paid.
For the sales agreement, both the land buyer and seller need to give their national identity cards, the sale price of the land, the date the sale was made, and names of the witnesses before it is stamped by the law firm.
I called the land seller in the presence of the lawyer, who gave him advice on how to get to the law firm the following day.
By about ten the following day, my cousin, who was the land buyer, myself, who was his witness and the mzee, who was selling the land and his witness were all at the lawyer’s office.
Once all the required documents had been handed over and stamped by the lawyer, we gave the seller the cash we had all agreed was the price of his property per his wishes and he gave us his title deed. We had withdrawn the money from the Equity Bank next door that morning.
Before leaving, we paid the lawyer a Sh40,000 fee, which is calculated as a percentage of the price of the land, for drafting the sale agreement and successfully conducting the sale. This payment is never fixed and varies from lawyer to lawyer.
The next step was to apply for an Application of Transfer of Title at the land registry the following morning. This requires you first to pay a fee and provide both the seller and the buyers’ information in the form of IDs and passport photos.
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With a filled application of transfer of title document and receipts which are processed in a couple of hours as well as the sale agreement days later we appeared before the county lands board which meets about two times every month to adjudicate land issues with the sales agreement and letter of land transfer after getting an SMS notification.
Once they established that there were no disputes regarding the land, we were greenlit to proceed to the final hurdle: the land valuer office.
After handing him the same two documents, the land valuer determined where the shamba was and its value before calculating the percentage of what you should pay from the purchase price. Once we did this, he stamped our documents, and our title was ready the following day.