Go slow on computerised land registry

By Humphrey W. Mitanda

With land brawls dominating debate in Uganda today, the computerised land registry could not have come at a better time.

But for the computerised land registry to yield its desired goals, authorities must pay attention to the numerous ‘red flags’ which have great potential to frustrate an otherwise well intentioned and costly reform.

It is quite an achievement for our country to have reached a stage of computerised land registry with a centralised database. This will make it easy in terms of accessibility, record keeping, safety and land management.

Basing on my job as a surveyor, I have come to know that a good land management system is dependent upon a well-managed land tenure system. This means that even if we acquire the best computerised land management system and then apply it to a poorly managed land tenure system, the result will be a complicated, not easily accessible, unsafe and a low standard computerised land registry.

To clarify on the above, it is well known that there is a problem of standardised referencing to our land tenure system, especially in areas with milo land. We have several cases of overlapping titles, titles having residual land yet on ground that land doesn’t exist. These problems have been magnified over the years as several surveys have been carried out without a centralised reference system in most cases, and thus magnifying any errors from the previous surveys on which current surveys are based.

The cadastral sheets in existence have several surveying errors, which have been ignored over several years, and most of these errors have been passed on to the certificates of title in form of wrong areas or location.

In my opinion, having the computerised system take in raw data (in form of information from existing white pages and geo-referenced cadastral sheets) with high magnitude errors, well known to most of the stakeholders in land management, amounts to recklessness on their part and loss of public funds in the end. As it is known for any computer system, they all work on a simple principle, “Garbage in-Garbage out”; so we shouldn’t expect to get good results from the computerised system, if what was recorded as the raw data had a big magnitude of errors.

All good reforms take time and begin at the grassroots; this means that our computerised land registry should be given time to be populated with the proper raw data. This data begins from the grassroots in form of each land owner undertaking a re-survey of their land in relation to a standardised referencing system (UTM). This means that the cadastral sheets that will be created from the field data will all be inter linked and thus forming a grand cadastral sheet for the whole country without any carried on errors and plot overlaps. This will even make it easier for the country’s cadastral data base to even be linked or used in hand with other positioning programmes like Google Earth. With the centrally referred data, each land owner will be able to obtain a unique land title, and we shall be sure that the computerised land registry has no duplicate or contradicting records.

This approach may certainly be looked at as slow, but we should remember that reform is mainly depended upon proper time allocation and not the allocation of funds. I urge the Government to halt the use of the computerized land registry with the current raw data, and give the new registry time to be populated with clean new raw data generated from the grassroots’ surveys.

I applaud the new staff structure at the several land offices in the country, but at this time the old system of accessing the registry should be used in cases of title searches and transfers. All the new field surveys should follow a well referenced coordinate system which has to be put in place by the Department of Lands & Surveys.

All land owners should be advised to re-survey their land and obtain new forgery proof and well managed titles. As time goes on, the registry will slowly be populated with raw data that has been thoroughly checked and guarded against duplication and forgery. As the registry is populated with good raw data, it will provide land owners with new well managed land titles, and other stake holders with a well managed land registry system.

Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA) is going to embark on creating a GIS Database, which is to be used in property and business identification and also in tax monitoring. The formation of KCCA’s GIS Database will primarily dependent upon proper ground survey of all the plots within KCCA’s jurisdiction, and then identifying the developments therein and their users.

This kind of direction is what the custodians of the computerised land registry should take; it is even possible to upgrade the computerized land registry into a GIS-based system, in that all the stakeholders who have an interest in land and its developmental characteristics (buildings, vegetation, tax rates, and business locations) can easily access it. With this suggested approach, the country will get closer to the Government’s view of a proper land management system through reform.

I urge Ugandans to stop putting much focus on short term solutions as an approach to reform and really buy into long term solutions and involvement in order to achieve the required reforms.

Humphrey W. Mitanda is a Registered Surveyor and Director Synergy Surveys & Associates