THE SKUNK IN THE ROOM
There is a moment that will outlive every gazette notice, every ceremonial swearing-in, and every press release that the new National Land Commission will ever issue.
It happened in a committee room in Parliament on the morning of Monday, March 9, 2026, when Dr Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy — President William Ruto’s personal choice to chair the commission that oversees Kenya’s 70-million-acre public land estate — looked at a panel of MPs and said: ‘I am a bit shaky.’
It was not a throwaway admission. It was a diagnosis.
The MPs had stripped away Alawy’s crib sheets. Committee chairman Joash Nyamoko, the North Mugirango MP who chaired the Departmental Committee on Lands, had already ordered the nominee to set aside the notes he was reading from after suspecting that questions had been leaked to him in advance.
Without his prepared script, Alawy could not field basic interrogation about the commission he had been nominated to lead. He sought permission to answer questions one by one because, in his own words, he found it difficult to recall them.
The committee refused. Kaloleni MP Paul Katana asked the question that hung over the entire session: ‘NLC is a huge responsibility. Will he manage the storm?’ Nobody has yet answered it.
The committee gave him a five-minute breather after Bahati MP Irene Njoki proposed it. When he returned, Alawy thanked the committee for its patience and confessed: ‘This is a new environment for me. I am already feeling the weight of NLC on my back. Usually, I am a very composed and listening person.’ It was the most revealing sentence of the entire vetting exercise.
The weight of the NLC — an institution charged with managing public land on behalf of 55 million Kenyans, investigating historical land injustices stretching back to colonial dispossession, and recommending national land policy — was apparently something Alawy encountered for the first time in that committee room. Despite all of this, the committee still recommended his approval. Parliament voted him through. President Ruto gazetted him within 24 hours.
“Are we serious as a country? Are we perpetuating land malpractices in the land sector? What kind of disservice are we doing to this country? It is a sad day.” — Dr Wilberforce Oundo, Funyula MP
TWICE REJECTED, THRICE LUCKY
This is not Alawy’s first parliamentary ordeal. In February 2014, former President Uhuru Kenyatta nominated him for appointment as a member of the National Gender and Equality Commission — a different constitutional body, but the same pattern.
The Labour and Social Welfare Committee, chaired by then Matungu MP David Were, vetted him and concluded bluntly that he was ‘out of touch with gender and equality challenges in Kenya to an extent that he could not identify even one minority group in Kenya.’
The committee found him unsuitable and rejected his nomination outright.
There was a further, more fundamental problem in 2014. The committee found that Alawy had lost his Kenyan citizenship in 2005 when he acquired American citizenship under the old constitution, which did not permit dual nationality.
He was asked to prove that he had lawfully resumed Kenyan citizenship.
The documents he presented — a declaration made the day after his vetting — were ruled ‘irrelevant to his case’ by the committee. He was unable to demonstrate, to the committee’s satisfaction, that due diligence was followed in regaining the citizenship that Article 14(5) of the 2010 Constitution entitles him to reclaim.
The full House overturned the committee’s rejection and Alawy served a six-year term on the gender commission.
His citizenship questions have not disappeared: during his NLC vetting this month, the issue resurfaced, with Alawy confirming he had at some point held American citizenship and had since renounced it.
What the record therefore shows is a man who carries a 12-year paper trail of parliamentary unease about his suitability for constitutional office.
That trail includes a formal rejection by a House committee, a disputed citizenship file, and a vetting performance so poor that even the committee that recommended him recorded in its official report that he was ‘shaky in responding.’ In any functioning meritocracy, this dossier would disqualify a candidate from the chairmanship of a ward development committee, let alone a constitutional commission. In Kenya in March 2026, it was apparently sufficient.
THE CONFLICT THAT PARLIAMENT NOTED AND THEN IGNORED
Perhaps the most explosive dimension of the Alawy nomination is not his academic credentials or his shakiness before MPs. It is what his family has been doing to the people of Wasini Island in Kwale County for the past four decades — and what it means for any community that finds itself in a land dispute with the Saggaf Alawy family while Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy chairs the institution that has jurisdiction over exactly such disputes.
The backstory is long and bitter. Wasini is a five-square-kilometre coral island off Kenya’s southern coast, home to some 1,700 residents who depend on fishing and tourism.
In 1979, the patriarch of the Saggaf Alawy family — Abdulrahman Saggaf Alawy, a former school teacher on the island — began a legal campaign to reclaim communal farmland known as the Puma, which he asserted the family owned by virtue of a 1908 land title ordinance issued during the era of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
What followed was nearly five decades of litigation, government commissions, surveys, injunctions, eviction threats, and community protests that have left the island in a state of perpetual anxiety.
In September 2025 — just five months before Ruto nominated Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy to chair the NLC — the government issued the Saggaf Alawy family a freehold title deed for 610 acres of Wasini Island, representing nearly half the island.
The National Land Commission, the very institution Alawy now chairs, had previously recognised the family as victims of historical injustice. Within weeks of receiving that title, the family issued formal eviction notices to hotel and cottage owners on the island.
Local leaders and residents, many of whom have lived on the land for generations, insist the land is ancestral and communal. MPs from the Coast had previously passed resolutions questioning the survey process and ordering residents to stay put. None of that stopped the eviction machinery.
During his NLC vetting, MPs pressed Alawy on whether he would recuse himself should Wasini Island matters come before the commission. He said he would. But the institutional problem runs deeper than one vote or one recusal.
The Saggaf family’s claim to nearly half of Wasini Island was processed through the NLC. The NLC issued gazette notices affirming their ownership. The NLC’s own historical injustice committee was the vehicle through which the family secured its legal victories.
A man whose family has already benefited from NLC decisions to the tune of Sh3.9 billion in prime coastal land — and who has himself declared a net worth of Sh62 million — is now the chairman of the body that will adjudicate the next generation of such disputes.
The Institute of Surveyors of Kenya and Kituo Cha Sheria both raised this concern in formal memoranda to the vetting committee. The committee noted their concerns in its report. Parliament then voted Alawy through.
“His family is involved in a land dispute in Wasini Island against the locals. Will you be fair to the residents if you are appointed?” — MP Paul Katana
THE CHAIR’S RECORD AT ADC: A DRESS REHEARSAL FOR FAILURE
Alawy’s defenders will point to his academic credentials — a PhD in Agricultural Education from Ohio State University, a background in monitoring and evaluation, decades of work in international development spanning 43 countries.
But credentials on paper and performance in office are different things, and the parliamentary record of his stewardship of the Agricultural Development Corporation is instructive.
Alawy has served as chairman of the ADC board, a state agency that manages some of Kenya’s most strategically important agricultural land, including the 1.7-million-acre Galana Kulalu ranch in Kilifi and Tana River counties.
The Galana Kulalu project is arguably the most catastrophically mismanaged land asset in modern Kenyan history.
The project consumed more than Sh14 billion in public funds while putting fewer than 10,000 of its projected million acres under cultivation. Parliament described it as a ‘spectacular fiasco.’ Under Alawy’s tenure as ADC chairman, 52,000 acres of ADC land were allocated to a cement factory in Mombasa even as landless communities in Tana River continued to wait for resettlement that had been promised since the presidency of Mwai Kibaki. A parliamentary resolution specifically directed that 250,000 acres of ADC land be allocated to landless residents in Tana River. Alawy did not implement it.
MPs during his NLC vetting also raised the matter of a parliamentary fact-finding visit to ADC offices in Tana River County, during which Alawy was reportedly absent.
Legislators described having travelled at taxpayer expense to ADC facilities only to find the ADC chairman unavailable to meet them. This is the man now entrusted with the chairmanship of the constitutional body mandated to manage all public land in Kenya.
THE COMMISSION’S SIX: A GALLERY OF THE UNQUALIFIED
The problem with Kenya’s new NLC is not limited to its chairman.
It is structural. Section 8 of the NLC Act sets a clear threshold: commissioners must hold a degree and have at least 15 years of knowledge and experience in land management and administration, natural resource management, land adjudication, land law, land surveying, spatial planning, land economics, public administration, or related social sciences. The seven nominees Ruto sent to Parliament are, by the assessment of multiple professional bodies, substantially incapable of meeting that statutory bar.
Susan Khakasa Oyatsi, designated vice-chairperson, is an accountant who served for approximately six years in an acting capacity as finance director at the Judiciary.
She has no background in land law, land surveying, spatial planning, or any of the core technical disciplines listed in Section 8.
Even Funyula MP Wilberforce Oundo, the most outspoken critic of the nominees during the House debate, conceded he had no objection to Oyatsi — a diplomatic hedge that nonetheless signals she is the closest thing to a technically defensible appointment in the batch.
Daniel Murithi Muriungi, nominated from Meru County, is described as a property lawyer and aviation practitioner.
Property law has tangential relevance to land administration, but the NLC’s mandate extends to adjudication, historical injustice investigations, compulsory acquisition, national land policy, and the oversight of county land management boards. Aviation practice contributes nothing to that mandate.
Kigen Vincent Cheruiyot, from Kericho County, is a certified human resource professional and former chairman of the National Employment Authority. Human resources is a management discipline. It has no connection to land governance.
Cheruiyot’s appointment to a body whose core technical functions are inherently spatial and legal in character is, on its face, a Section 8 anomaly.
The ISK’s president Eric Nyadimo put it plainly: the NLC’s statutory work involves land survey, valuation, physical planning, environmental management, and land administration. ‘How will the team that has been proposed carry out these core functions when all these matters are alien to them?’ he asked. Nobody answered him.
Mohamed Abdi Haji Mohamed, former Banissa MP, brings a legislative background to the commission. His constituency lies in the pastoral northeast, a region with acute and historically under-served land tenure problems.
Haji’s political experience is not nothing — commissioners who understand community land tensions in arid and semi-arid regions serve a genuine function.
But his is not a technical appointment, and the NLC is, above all else, a technical institution.
Mary Yiane Seneta, former Kajiado County Women Representative, holds a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Nairobi. She was among nominees shortlisted for the Salaries and Remuneration Commission in 2025 and did not make the final cut.
She brings no evident land expertise to an institution that will resolve title disputes, compulsory acquisitions, and resource allocation decisions affecting millions of Kenyans.
Dr Julie Ouma Oseko, from Siaya County, is described as an advocate and senior legal consultant. Of all six commissioners, she comes closest to the legal competencies the NLC requires. Her confirmation of legal standing would depend on the nature of her practice, but at minimum she represents a partial exception to the broader pattern.
“We are populating the commission with Kenyans who have no qualifications at all, as clearly outlined in this Act.” — Dr Wilberforce Oundo, MP, on the floor of the National Assembly
THE PROFESSIONALS WHO WERE PASSED OVER
The Institution of Surveyors of Kenya, the Architectural Association of Kenya, and Kituo Cha Sheria all submitted formal memoranda opposing the nominations before vetting began. ISK president Nyadimo’s public statement raised a question that the selection panel has not answered: was there a scoring system? Qualified land surveyors, spatial planners, land economists, and land lawyers applied for positions on the NLC.
The selection panel, whose proceedings are not transparent to the public, passed them over in favour of a human resources professional, a finance officer, a former MP, and a woman with a degree in education.
Section 8 of the NLC Act was not drafted idly. It was designed by the architects of Kenya’s 2010 constitutional settlement to ensure that the body charged with addressing one of Africa’s most complex inherited land problems — colonial dispossession, adjudication irregularities, historical injustice, compulsory acquisition and compensation — would be staffed by people who understand what they are doing.
The current selection process has produced a commission where the dominant expertise appears to be loyalty.
PARLIAMENT: A SIDESHOW WITH OFFICIAL STATIONERY
The most dispiriting element of this episode is not what the President did. Presidents appoint allies. That is a political constant. The most dispiriting element is what Parliament did. The Departmental Committee on Lands heard the evidence.
MPs questioned Alawy’s citizenship history, his conflict of interest in Wasini Island, his failure at ADC, his inability to answer questions without a cheat sheet, and his visible breakdown under routine interrogation.
The committee chairperson told him on the record that his shakiness would be noted in the official report. It was noted. The committee then recommended his approval.
The full House adopted the report. Parliament discharged its constitutional function of vetting presidential nominees by noting every reason the nominees should be rejected, writing those reasons into its official record, and voting yes.
Oundo, who delivered the most searing indictment of the nominations on the floor of the House, captured the capitulation in a single sentence: ‘I would have easily stood here and said I oppose this motion, but the commission has to run.’ The commission has to run. It is the oldest and most reliable justification for institutional surrender in Kenyan public life. The commission has to run, therefore the unqualified must be confirmed.
The state house has spoken, therefore the oversight mechanism must perform its ritual and stand aside. Leader of Majority Kimani Ichung’wah even attempted to silence Oundo, demanding he substantiate his criticisms or withdraw and apologise. Oundo declined.
He told his colleagues they should have had the courage to return the nominations to the appointing authority. They did not.
The swearing-in of the new NLC commissioners was deferred on the day the gazette notice was published because Chief Justice Martha Koome and Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu were unavailable. It was, perhaps, an unintentional metaphor.
The republic’s most senior judicial officer was not present to witness the formal installation of the commission that will adjudicate land rights for the next six years.
WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN ANY OTHER BAD APPOINTMENT
Kenya is a country in which the word ‘land’ has triggered ethnic conflict, electoral violence, mass displacement, judicial corruption, and political assassination. The National Land Commission is not a decorative constitutional body. It manages public land on behalf of national and county governments. It investigates historical injustices.
It recommends compulsory acquisition of private land for public purpose. It advises on national land policy. It monitors land use planning. Its decisions determine whether communities are settled or evicted, whether infrastructure projects proceed or stall, whether colonial-era grievances are addressed or compounded.
A commission staffed by people who, in the words of the ISK, find the commission’s ‘core functions alien to them’ is not merely an ineffective commission. It is a dangerous one.
And at the head of that commission sits a man whose family has a Sh3.9 billion stake in a land dispute that passed through the very institution he now chairs, who struggled to answer questions without a script, who was rejected by a parliamentary committee twelve years ago, and who told the nation’s elected representatives that he was feeling the weight of the NLC on his back in the room where he was supposed to demonstrate he could carry it.
Ruto has had his skunk. Parliament has accepted delivery. Six years is a long time for an island community to wait.
Section 8 of the National Land Commission Act (Cap. 281) requires that all commissioners hold a degree and possess at least 15 years of knowledge and experience in: public administration, land management and administration, natural resource management, land adjudication and settlement, land law, land surveying, spatial planning, land economics, or social sciences — in addition to satisfying the Chapter Six integrity requirements of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.
Section 5 confers on the commission the mandate to manage public land, recommend national land policy, investigate historical injustices, and monitor land use planning across all 47 counties.
