The late Cabinet Minister Arthur Magugu's widow, Margaret Wairimu is asking police to help her and bar an alleged private developer from encroaching on her 21-acre piece of land in Nairobi's Muthaiga North estate.
Wairimu says the developer has grabbed her land after she allegedly lost its title deed in 2015. She accuses the developer of putting up a perimeter fence around the land with a view to developing it.
Magugu was a former minister in the late President Daniel Arap Moi administration and was at one time the Finance Minister and he died in 2015. He also served as the MP for Githunguri in Kiambu County on a Kanu ticket.
A visit to the land early this week found work going on, and a manager at the site who did not want his name to be disclosed said that the developer bought the land from the late Cabinet minister and holds genuine ownership documents.
He accused Wairimu of sending youths to harass his workers putting up the fence, adding that the elderly woman was trying to reclaim the land when she knows her husband sold it.
Wairimu says the land was part of the about 900 acres her husband and other three directors bought in the early 1970s.
She says her late husband was managing the land until after his death in 2012 when she began managing the land and some of the family properties as administrator. She claimed that it was when she began managing the land that she discovered documents pertaining to the ownership of the parcel were missing.
Wairimu reported the loss of documents at Kamukunji Police station and the complaint was booked under OBNo44/03/07/2015.
In April 2016, the late minister's widow says she wrote to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations demanding a forensic audit on documents used by some individuals to acquire her husband's land. The widow laments that police have never taken action even after she physically presented herself to them in 2016.
She says she has presented her complaint to Kasarani DCIO Vincent Kipkorir at Kasarani Police Station. The DCIO confirmed that the widow had reported the matter and that they had summoned the developer to present ownership documents, which he promised to deliver but has not done so.
She says that she has also informed a number of provincial administrators in Nairobi County to help her recover her land.
Efforts to reach people who claimed to have bought the land alongside the late Magugu were futile as some of them are deceased.
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