This left Harry Johnston, the Commissioner of the protectorate, with a major problem. He did not consider that the government had any general claim to ownership of land in the protectorate, and he believed that the land belonged to its African communities, so their chiefs had no right to alienate it to anyone. However, he also accepted that the agreements the chiefs had made with Europeans might be regarded as evidence of land sales. To solve this dilemma, he put forward the legal fiction that each chief's people had tacitly accepted that he could assume the right to sell vacant land not currently being used by the community. He also claimed that he was entitled to investigate if these sales were valid and, if they were, to issue Certificates of Claim (a registration of freehold title) to the land to the new owners.