The ministers in charge of the Interior, Justice and Infrastructure were at the National Assembly on Wednesday for a session of oral questions followed by debates. The questions of the deputies were related to the payment of taxes when buying, selling, registering and transferring land properties.

Before the oral questions session, the Standing Committee on Finance presented the report on the searches carried out in all the provinces. The observation was that during the registration of properties and the acquisition of certain documents, citizens sometimes pay taxes not provided for by law. Following the many steps, the population is not in a hurry to have their plots registered.

The standing committee recommended that the ministries of the interior immediately stop the payments of taxes not provided for by law at the level of municipalities and provinces in the process of registering land plots.
The commission also recommended that the Ministry of the Interior remove all unnecessary steps in registering land plots that unnecessarily tire the population. At the Ministry of Justice, the Committee recommended that the documents required in this area be specified.

During the oral questions, MEPs raised several concerns of citizens in the field of land. They are worried that land applicants pay the service fees in the urban planning services to acquire plots, but they go several years without having these plots to build them.

MEPs asked if there were no ways to decentralize land titles because the acquisition of title requires a lot of resources. They asked if the department could not pay for land titles officers' travel expenses to arrive on the land. The deputies asked if after fighting the livestock commissioners there was no way to do it also for the commissionaires of houses and plots.

MEPs deplore the long procedures for the acquisition of land documents. They also deplore the low value of the land certificate issued at the municipal level and want this document to be valued in the same way as the land title.

Responding to the concerns of deputies on collaboration between services, the Minister of the Interior said that the government's vision is to set up a municipal executive. This will allow citizens to benefit from all the public services of the ministries in the same place.

For Interior Minister Gervais Ndirakobuca, there is no reason for communal administrators to continue to charge taxes related to the registration of plots. The ministry will send inspection missions and in the event of a repeat offense, the ministry will start applying sanctions to offenders.

The Minister of Justice Jeanine Nibizi for her part finds it necessary for state-owned land to be registered. Otherwise, she explains, people are trying to make it their own. She contends that land certificates and land titles have the same value because even the procedures for obtaining both documents are the same. Only land certificates are issued for plots in rural areas.

During the oral question session, the President of the National Assembly Gelase Daniel Ndabirabe raised the issue of decentralization and computerization of land title and notary services. The Minister of Justice replied that the question was relevant. For the minister, computerization would limit cases of cheating, “We are in the process of meeting the related challenges to find solutions to them”, she reassured.

As for the Minister in charge of Infrastructure, Déogratias Nsanganiyumwami, he reassured the deputies that the activities of the OBUHA will start soon. He explained that the OBUHA has just had sufficient human resources with the last recruitment and that it currently has 348 agents with a budget revised upward, from 8 to 21 billion.

Minister Déogratias Nsanganiyumwami recognizes that the procedures for acquiring plot documents are long. However, it is reassuring because the OBUHA, which is headquartered in Gitega, will have offices in all provinces of the country, which will improve its services in the interests of citizens.