Ntutu and Tipis kin land case begins 21 years later

 

Former Defence Minister Justus ole Tipis [Courtesy]

The High Court has begun hearing a property case pitting the families of former Defence Minister Justus ole Tipis, former Narok senior chief Lerianko ole Ntutu, and others.

The subject of the dispute is an 830-acre land in Narok County claimed by the Tipis, Ntutus, a medical doctor and an employee of the former minister.

Dr Yussuf Mohammed, a 58-year-old medical doctor, who is based in Mombasa, took to the witness stand on Wednesday evening, accusing the Tipis family of betraying him after the minister died in 1994.

Dr Mohammed told Justice John Mutungi of the Environment and Lands Court in Nakuru that he was allocated a 148-acre land by Lemek Ranch Group, a group he was a part of, on April 22, 2019.

He said the allocation didn’t sit well with the children and widow of the late minister, who had a 1,000-acre land adjacent to his.

“The late minister and my father were good friends and we lived in peace. However, after he died, his widow and children wanted to take over all the property including mine,” he testified.

He said they didn’t just take their livestock to graze on his land but also demolished temporary structures he had constructed and threatened to evict him.

“They came several times armed with weapons to intimidate us to leave the land,” he said.

Dr Mohammed said the property belonged to him. He produced a title deed and informed the court the deed was issued in 1999 and has never been contested.

He added that the Tipis family were supposed to be allocated the 1,000-acre land and nothing more, and their claim on his land is pointless. “They do not even have the title for the land they claim,” he said.

He accused the family of using goons to disrupt him in his agricultural work on the farm, something he had reported to the police, but no action was taken.

Dr Mohammed wants the 148-acre land and nothing less and has urged the court to dismiss Tipis family’s case over the land ownership.

Mr Lameria ole Karia, a former employee of the late minister, who claims ownership of a 151-acre land also took the stand against Tipis’s kin. Karia was employed at the minister’s home between 1996 and 2000 within which a boundary dispute erupted between the four families and was allegedly resolved in 1999.

However, he claimed that Tipis’ family started laying claim on his cultivated land where he had reared livestock and even used it to obtain a loan between 2006 and 2011.

He accused Tipis’s son Eric Lengeseni of hiring goons to forcefully take over his land after the minister died.

At some point, Karia claimed that Lengeseni hired people to plant on his cultivated land and the armed goons injured him and shot his brother. “I was injured on November 13, 2011, I took a P3 at the hospital,” he testified. He insisted that he was not aware of how a boundary dispute turned into a land case.

Tipis’ deceased wife Rhoda Tipis filed the case on March 15, 2001, seeking rights for her and her children to possess the 830-acre land. 

She deposed that her late husband was gifted two parcels by Lemek (The 1,000 acre and the 830 acres). Minutes of a meeting held on September 3, 1992, filed in court as evidence showed the group allocated the deceased the two between 1971 and 1992.

However, the documents show Tipis only managed to obtain titles for the 1,000-acre land on April 20, 1977. Dr Mohammed, Ntutu’s and Karia’s kin obtained titles for the 830-acre parcel.

Rhoda’s death in 2007 saw her son Lengeseni join forces with his sister to fight for the property.

In their filed documents, Ntutu’s kin, Nanyiku Ntutu, and Looyieyio Ntutu claim they bought their land from the group which had a membership of over 1,000.

They claim the Tipis’s family removed the boundary beacons in 2001 and extended their boundary to the disputed land.

The case has been delayed because of a series of incidences of the disappearance of court files, judges’ recusals, and transfers of the case from Nairobi to Nakuru to Narok and back to Nakuru.