Asynchronous Futures: The Temporalities of Digitalisation in Kenya's Land Governance

Abstract

Why does the Kenyan state's aspirations to become Africa's 'Silicon Savannah' in the future appear unrealistic now? To answer this question, I will argue that statecraft in an era of digitalisation in Kenya is tied to a temporal politics of fragmentations, asynchronicities and extensions. In order to understand why lofty aspirations of state digitalisation initiatives often do not reach fruition, I suggest that we need to examine how temporal power works across state spaces and scales. Drawing upon 60 semi-structured interviews with a range of state and non-state actors involved in the digitalisation of land administration, I will argue that digitalisation transforms the social relations of power between state and non-state actors who were earlier able to engage in what various scholars have called ‘land mischiefs’. I suggest that statecraft, particularly of land administration in the Nairobi metropolitan region is tied to maintaining three aspects of temporal power – first the continued circulation of paper information asynchronous to digital systems; second, shifts in formal and de-facto social networks in the state to induce temporal arbitrage in everyday land transactions; third, blockades in the temporalities of digitalisation by state and non-state actors that begin to unravel aspirations for seamless land governance in the future. Digitalisation of land administration is intended to initiate a system change in social power relations across state and non-state actors, but in reality, it produces temporal manipulations over when, where and who gets to manage its complex interests in land.