Presidential Exemptions Under the Land Control Act: How Section 24 Actually Works

Land Control Act Exemptions Kenya matters more than most businesses realise until it is too late; here is what actually applies.

When a Land Control Board is required to refuse consent, most people assume that is the end of the road. It usually is, but the Land Control Act itself provides one narrow way through: a Presidential exemption under section 24. It is discretionary, rarely used, and poorly understood, which is exactly why it is worth explaining properly rather than dismissing outright.

Land Control Act Exemptions Kenya: Key Points to Get Right

This is worth getting right the first time, since the cost of a mistake is rarely small. The official source sits at new.kenyalaw.org, and what follows is how it applies in practice.

What section 24 actually says

Section 24 of the Land Control Act, Cap 302 provides that the President may, by notice in the Gazette, exempt any land or share, or any class of land or share, from the Act’s provisions, exempt any controlled transaction, or any class of controlled transaction, and exempt any person in respect of controlled transactions, or some class of controlled transaction. In plain terms, the exemption can attach to a specific parcel, to a category of transaction, or to a specific person or category of persons, rather than being a single fixed procedure that applies the same way in every case.

This is a genuinely separate mechanism from a Land Control Board’s ordinary consent decision under section 9. A board applies the Act to a specific application in front of it and, where a mandatory refusal ground applies, such as the transferee not being a citizen, has no discretion to depart from the statute. Section 24 sits above that entirely: it is the Act declaring itself inapplicable to the land, transaction, or person in question, by a Gazette notice from the President rather than a board decision.

Who this is realistically for

The most common scenario is a non-citizen individual or a foreign-controlled company that needs to hold an interest in agricultural land within a land control area, where the land does not qualify for the title-restriction exclusion that would take it outside the Act altogether. Large-scale investment projects, particularly ones with a government-facing dimension, such as strategic infrastructure, agriculture, or energy projects, are the kind of case where this route has historically been pursued, since the exemption is inherently discretionary and tends to follow from broader government engagement rather than a routine application. It is not a substitute for ordinary structuring advice and should not be the first option considered; confirming whether the land actually falls within the Act’s agricultural land definition in the first place, and whether a citizen-owned holding structure can be used instead, will resolve most situations without needing an exemption at all.

How to apply

The Land Control Regulations set out the procedural side of an exemption application: it is forwarded to the Commissioner of Lands, accompanied by an application fee of twenty thousand shillings. Beyond that procedural filing, there is no published checklist of criteria the President will apply, no statutory timeline for a decision, and no right of appeal if the request is not granted, since this is an executive discretion exercised by Gazette notice, not a board decision subject to the Act’s appeal provisions. That combination, a real but open-ended discretion, is why an exemption application needs to be treated as a substantive engagement with government rather than a form filed and waited on.

What an exemption does and does not fix

An exemption granted under section 24 removes the Land Control Act’s application to whatever it specifies, land, transaction type, or person. It does not touch Article 65 of the Constitution, which independently caps non-citizen landholding at leasehold tenure not exceeding 99 years regardless of any Land Control Act exemption. It also does not exempt a transaction from other requirements entirely outside the Land Control Act, county planning approvals, environmental licensing, or, where the land is community land, the separate consent regime under the Community Land Act, 2016. An exemption solves the specific mandatory refusal problem under the Land Control Act. It is one piece of a structure, not a substitute for the rest of it.

Individual exemptions versus class exemptions

Section 24 does not only provide for one-off, individually named exemptions. It also allows the President to exempt an entire class of land, an entire class of controlled transaction, or an entire class of persons, from the Act. In practice, individually negotiated exemptions tied to a specific parcel or a specific investor are the more common route for a single transaction, but the broader class-exemption power is worth knowing about, since a sector-wide or region-wide exemption, if one exists for a particular type of project, could remove the need for an individual application altogether. Confirming whether any relevant class exemption is already in force for your sector or region, by checking the Kenya Gazette, is worth doing before assuming an individual application is the only path.

Because every exemption under section 24 takes effect by Gazette notice, it is a matter of public record once granted. That also means an exemption cannot be agreed informally or promised verbally by an official; until it is actually published in the Gazette, it does not exist as a matter of law, and a transaction structured on the assumption that an exemption is coming, before it has been gazetted, is a transaction structured on a document that does not yet exist.