Recent pro-distributed ledger technology (DLT) announcement by His excellency the President of Kenya, followed immediately by the appointment of Blockchain task force to look into the creation of Blockchain governance for the land registry was a pretty heroic move especially considering the DLT discordance in the country amongst different government officials and regulatory bodies including Capital Markets Authority (CMA) and Central Bank of Kenya (CBK).

The best way to represent and probably formalise both formal and informal land registry information is through incentivising neutral participants (not government employees) to participate in streamlining the process of land registration and recognition of informal land registries. Participation of an incentivised neutral agent with no probable allegiance to the central authority that governs land registries is the most ideal DLT model. Any other model that illuminates in a heavenly light the same participants who oversee the current ailing centralised land registration process serves to reincarnate the same problems that DLT seeks to solves.

It may be hard to fathom the dangers of superimposing the current central authority governors to control a newly commissioned DLT without prior investment in the training, demystification of the DLT /cryptocurrency amongst the DLT participants/validators. DLT is infinite so long as the internet is not shut down, a risk equivalent to the sun falling down on us all, creating instant hell of significant proportions – a million times worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since DLT data can not be deleted, it is therefore hard not to imagine the dangers of working with incentivised participants who probably just want a salary at the end of the month.

Perhaps the first step would be for the government of Kenya to invest heavily with an intention of creating awareness in Blockchain technology application in the current land governance structure. As we wait for 5 years, to see what the Blockchain taskforce in Kenya will come up with, and since it’s all open source technology – Harambee Token is in no way offending anyone by offering unsolicited guidance purely for the passion of DLT and the fact that we have already created Dapp that posts land title rights to the DLT. The system of Blockchain title registration is heavily dependent on the participation of unrelated, trusted third parties who should remain anonymous to each other for obvious reasons especially if data sanctity has to be preserved. The idea is to make each participant incentivised to work for the DLT system while creating a significant difficulty for participants to collaborate against the DLT system, for instance – where a participant is tempted to defraud the DLT process, the effort should be extremely laborious and the anticipated repercussions should be serious enough to deter participation in corrupting the system. On that note, it is therefore important for the task force to evaluate with great intent building an incentivised arm of validators as oppposed to employees or else the database will just be another DLT with corrupted consensus protocol architecture, hence meaningless. Perhaps the government of Kenya may issue a token similar to the Harambee Token, and make sure the token embedded cryptoeconomies are sufficient to create reasonable utility for the purposes of mass token adoption as well as to assert significance amongst the peer to peer participants ( most likely the ministry of lands employees at this stage).

The following reasons would explain why a government official operating without an incentive model should not be trusted to validate land transactional details;

Poor salary structure. Non existent DLT incentive economies. Unknown/unpublished DLT out put incentives that outweigh the benefits of cheating the system. If you follow history, land graft has been associated with middle men especially government employees who struggle to make ends meet due to the unattractive payroll. It is not uncommon for most government officials, the world over, to portray a certain slack mentality and a sense of inferiority compared to their peers in the private sector. This is easily translated into poor performance and off course a suboptimal remuneration. To compensate for this obviously approachable fact, government officials are subtly drawn towards compromising professsional ethos for financial gain.

Land LayBy will work and support all governments in the developing world, who wish to explore and adopt functional, efficient DLT Land Registries.