Nairobi — A significant stage of the Sh3.8-billion automation project at the Ministry of Lands will be marked in May when the new information management system is up and running, the Saturday Nation has learnt.

It is believed that the system, once operational, will transform service delivery in land transactions.

The automation is touted as the surest way to fight cartels at the ministry, which are robbing the government of millions of shillings, according to permanent secretary Dorothy Angote.

But even with the minimal reforms carried out so far, the ministry's revenue collection has increased from Sh32 million a day countrywide to Sh32 million a day only at the head office.

The ministry intends to triple this figure.

"Since July, last year, the ministry has collected Sh4.4 billion as at last Friday, March, 5," says Ms Angote.

"Our major concern, however, is the issue of cartels," says the PS who, in the course of her work, has had to contend with two common phrases -- "if you don't mind" and "missing files".

Her experience with several people who, after she responds to their greetings and an exchange of pleasantries, swiftly follow by inquiries about a file missing here and there.

It has happened to her in church as well as at supermarkets, hotels and restaurants and in the streets. In the same way, most calls to her office are centred on that one theme -- "missing files".

She got fed up so much that, on March 1, this year, she decided to do what is least expected of her, physically look for those files.

This led to a search at the Lands offices, an exercise that saw the ministry's operations come to a near-standstill.

"I had to move from office to office, physically looking for the files," she recalls. "To my shock, I found thousands of them, with some having 1995 as the year the last correspondence was filed."

Thousands more have since been returned to the ministry's registry. A quick perusal of the files by the Saturday Nation showed that most of them have no pending action.

"We are still profiling the files and the officers concerned are to explain what they were doing with them," says the PS. "The whole exercise is quite shocking."

She at first could not understand it all, and she had to sit down with the ministry's senior officers for her to get to the bottom of the matter.

But the major headache is how to eliminate the cartels.

Ms Angote says it has dawned on her how powerful the cartels are -- with connections and money.

But the permanent secretary is not about to give up the fight to shut the doors on them.

The ongoing automation is key to her success, she points out.

Perhaps, nobody understands these cartels' operations better than the lands commissioner, Mr Zablon Agwata Mabea.

He describes them as "dangerous", citing the "amounts of money" involved and the "profiles of the people" behind them.

"If you become a stumbling block to their "deal", they could easily come for your neck," the commissioner says.

But he, like his PS, is convinced that an automated system will lock them out, as there will be transparency which, he explains, is lacking in the current manual system. A little progress has, however, been made to slow down the cartels' operations.

For instance, when the commissioner realised that most of the fake title deeds used to come through the City Council, he barred (council) officers from the registry, where files are kept.

"I have since issued a directive to our officers not to allow City Hall representatives access to the registry," the PS says.

"They used to come with the fake documents and insert them into our files."

Ms Angote says she could guess the cartels' "network and might" only when an MP asked her to transfer a "corrupt" clerk in the Lands ministry, but that the clerk should not know where the directive came from.

"If an MP can be scared of a mere clerk, it can only show how powerful and scaring the cartel network is," the PS says.