Lake Turkana Wind Power: a court cancelled the title after the turbines were built

Africa's largest wind farm was built, financed, energised and connected to the Kenyan grid before a court held that the land under it had been taken from its owners unlawfully. On 19 October 2021 the Environment and Land Court at Meru found that roughly 150,000 acres of community land in Marsabit County had been set apart for Lake Turkana Wind Power without following the process the law required, and declared the resulting titles irregular.[1][3]

The court did not stop the project. It gave the State respondents twelve months to regularise the acquisition — failing which the titles would stand cancelled and the land would revert to the community.[3] An application to review that judgment was refused on 22 May 2023.[2]

A land defect does not expire at commissioning. It waits, and it capitalises.

Why "we signed an agreement with the community" was not enough

The claim was brought in 2014 by six residents suing on behalf of the people of Laisamis Constituency and Karare Ward, against the National Land Commission, the county government, the Attorney General, the Chief Land Registrar and the company.[1] Their case was not that they had been paid too little. It was that the land was never the grantor's to give.

That is a distinct legal defect, and it is the one most easily missed by a RAP process built around identifying occupants and valuing their assets. Under Article 63 of the Constitution of Kenya, community land vests in communities identified on the basis of ethnicity, culture or similar community of interest; the Community Land Act 2016 was enacted to give that provision effect, including the recognition, registration and administration of those rights.[5] Land that is unregistered community land does not stop being community land, and the process for converting or setting it apart is a legal process with conditions attached.[6]

A census can be complete, a consultation log can be full, and an access agreement can be signed by people who genuinely live there — and the transaction can still be void, because the question of who was competent to alienate the land is separate from the question of who occupies it.

Where the tenure question sits in a RAP, and where it usually sits

PS-5 requires that the project document tenure and eligibility and that it pay attention to communal holdings and to people with customary or unrecognised rights.[7] Guidance Note 5 is explicit that customary rights of use are entitlements even where they are not recorded in a register.[8] What neither can do is validate a defective grant under national law. The lender standard and the domestic title chain are two separate tests, and passing one has never satisfied the other.

In practice the tenure question tends to be resolved once, early, by whoever prepared the land-access strategy — often before the social team is mobilised — and is then treated as settled input rather than as a live risk carried in the register. Marsabit is what that costs. The census teams who followed were working downstream of a defect they had no mandate to find.

Consent, and the group that was not in the room

The communities affected are pastoralist, and the land at issue was described in the proceedings as ancestral and grazing land held for future generations — a use pattern that is seasonal, mobile and collective rather than parcel-bound.[4] Advocacy on the case has centred on the absence of free, prior and informed consent and on compensation that did not reflect what was taken.[4][3]

For a practitioner the operative lesson is about who represents a community and what evidence proves it. A signature from a committee is evidence that a committee signed. Whether that committee held the legal authority to alienate community land, whether the statutory quorum and process were met, and whether seasonal users outside the settled population were reached — those are separate propositions requiring separate records. The judgment turned on precisely that gap.

What the register should have carried

• The tenure derivation for every parcel — not the title number alone, but the instrument that created it, the process relied on to set the land apart, and the statutory conditions attaching to that process. A title number recorded without its derivation is a fact that cannot be re-checked.
• The authority to consent, evidenced separately from the consent itself: who the body was, under which provision it acted, how it was constituted, and what quorum or ratification the law required.
• Seasonal and non-resident users identified as rights-holders in their own right, with the grazing calendar and access routes recorded — otherwise a mobile population is systematically absent from a survey that only counts what stands still.
• The legal risk itself, versioned and owned. Where tenure rests on a contested process, that should appear in the register as an open item with a holder and a review date, not as a closed assumption in a due-diligence report filed at financial close.

The commercial reading

Lake Turkana Wind Power is a 310 MW plant that reached the grid and supplies a material share of Kenya's installed capacity.[3] Nothing about the engineering failed. What was exposed was a land-acquisition process that could not survive being examined, seven years after the fact, by a court applying the ordinary domestic law of community land — and a project record that apparently could not answer the challenge on its own evidence.

That is the argument for treating the tenure chain as part of the resettlement record rather than as a precondition to it. The register that can produce the derivation, the consent authority and the affected-user list on demand is the one that makes a challenge like this survivable.

What this case does not establish

This account rests on the reported court record and on secondary case profiles that resolve publicly; it does not rest on any project register, and no confidential document was consulted. Kenya Law bot-blocks automated requests site-wide, so the primary judgment links here were verified by citation rather than by machine retrieval — open them in a browser. The 2021 judgment date is given as 19 October in most reports and as 1 November in at least one; the substantive holding is not in dispute between them.[3] The court found the process irregular and preserved the project; it did not make findings of bad faith against any party, and it did not fix compensation. Nothing here is legal advice on Kenyan land law or on any claim arising from this project.