Lm Obala

Ethnicity, corruption and violence in urban land conflict in Kenya

Relatively little has been recorded about the relationships among ethnicity, corruption and conflict over urban land, especially at community level. The stories of land matters in four lower-income settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, drawn from extensive interviews with their occupants and officials and field observations, shed light on the roles of corruption and ethnicity in land conflicts and the character of violence involved. At the same time, they reveal new details of competition for urban land rights. In these cases, land conflict seemed to promote corruption and the use of ethnicity, while corruption and ethnicity were able to alter the relationship of this conflict to violence. There are findings here regarding sources of urban violence in general.

The effect of existing land tenure systems on urban land development: A case study of Kenya’s secondary towns, with emphasis on Kisumu

Abstract The Kenya Government has over a number of years pursued policies geared towards the promotion of secondary towns. Included in this strategy is the achievement of an orderly and coordinated urban land development. However, experience from these towns indicates that, planned land development has encountered a lot of bottlenecks particularly in relation to the institution of private ownership of land. This paper traces the land tenure systems that have existed in the Kenya’s secondary towns. In general, the paper examines the effects of land tenure forms on the provision of housing and the related infrastructure. The effects of existing land tenure identified include influence on housing development, influence on planned land development, cloudiness of titles, hoarding and speculation, insecurity, inflexibility and inequity. The paper concludes by making suggestions based on the observed bottlenecks that should be considered to encourage and promote systematic urban land development in secondary towns.