ArdhiSasa System Downtime Costs Nairobi County Weeks of Land Transactions
The digital land registry has been offline since September 1, causing a backlog of title transfers, mortgage registrations and sale agreements.
INFINITY254 MEDIA
Columnist · 11 September 2026, 4:00 PM EAT
Nairobi conveyancing lawyer Patricia Omondi had 14 land transactions scheduled to finalise in the first week of September. As of Thursday, September 11, she had completed zero of them. The ArdhiSasa platform — the government's flagship digital land registry that replaced the old paper-based system — has been offline since September 1, and the Ministry of Lands has provided no timeline for restoration and no alternative process for urgent transactions.
"My clients are losing money. One is a buyer who loses their mortgage rate lock if the transaction doesn't complete by September 15. Another is a seller who has made purchasing commitments contingent on receiving sale proceeds. Two weeks of downtime is not a technical inconvenience — it is a legal and financial emergency," Omondi said.
LSK President Charles Kanjama issued a sharply worded statement calling the situation "unacceptable" and demanding that the Ministry of Lands explain the cause of the outage, provide a restoration timeline and establish emergency manual processing procedures for time-sensitive transactions. "The government spent years and billions of shillings convincing the legal profession and the public to trust a digital system. That trust is built on the assumption of reliability. It cannot be treated as optional," Kanjama said.
Nairobi City County Finance Executive Ibrahim Auma confirmed separately that the downtime had also affected the county's ability to verify land ownership for revenue purposes. "Digitising land records is critical for identifying properties and generating rates revenue. When ArdhiSasa is down, we cannot do that work," he said.
Ministry of Lands CS Alice Wahome's office attributed the downtime to a "server migration and security upgrade process" and said the system would be restored in phases beginning September 15. Critics noted that a planned maintenance window of this magnitude should have been communicated to users weeks in advance — and that no such communication was made.