MAU FOREST COMPLEX: Raila Odinga’s Real Acid Test

Isaac Ruto & Company playing disgraceful KANU politics with Kenya’s livelihood

Sitting some 250 kilometers North-West of Nairobi, the Mau Forest Complex covers approximately 400,000 hectares (about 900km2) straddling no less than ten administrative districts in the Rift Valley Province. At independence in 1963, it was the single largest block of montane and moist indigenous forest in East Africa but thanks to partisan party politics it has now been sadly depleted to about 22 patches of forest.
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As the country’s biggest water catchment area, the Mau forest occupies a central place in the economic and ecological lifeline of the people of Rift Valley, Western and Nyanza provinces. Indeed, the national economy stands to lose over US $300 million to the tea, tourism and energy sectors alone if the forest of the Mau Complex continues to be degraded. The Tanzanian government has already formally protested about the effects the Mau degradation is costing her environment and economy, while the Uganda and Egypt governments are said to be closely watching how Kenya will resolve this Mau fiasco that has now taken an international dimension.

Past political expediency resulted into systematic illegal excision of huge parcels that reduced forest cover in Kenya from approximately 1.7 million hectares in 1963 to 1.4 million hectares as at 2005, which translates to only 2.5% of the total land area and a meager 1.7% under closed canopy. A country with less than 10% of its area under closed canopy forest is considered “environmentally unsecure”.

At the height of his autocratic rule, President Moi’s KANU government de-gazetted huge tracts of forest land to irregularly reward party supporters. The infamous Ndung'u land report revealed that there are more than 200,000 illegal and irregular title deeds which were fraudulently issued in the Mau Complex, most of them to politically connected personalities, some of whom later sold the land to unsuspecting investors and members of the public.

Lately, the Mau has been turned into a nasty political tug of war for supremacy between MPs from the Maasai and Kipsigis communities, and this war is already threatening to degenerate into ethnic clashes. To make matters worse, some of the Kipsigis MPs led by Isaac Ruto are using the Mau as a tool of blackmail for settling political scores (read: cabinet appointments) within ODM. The Kipsigis MPs are throwing needless roadblocks into efforts to reclaim and restore the Mau forest as they know it is their people who are occupying and destroying the forest while, a little further downstream, Maasai communities are watching in horror as rivers are drying up and weather patterns are becoming harsher. Others hypocrites opposing the Mau evictions like Franklin Bett are themselves beneficiaries of the fraudulent Mau allocations by Moi.

The very nature of our politics has effectively turned the Mau Forest into very hot political potato as well as a massive environmental time bomb. The reality of the matter is that there is only one solution to the Mau problem: TOTAL EVICTION

Considering the loud war-cries emanating from the Kipsigis axis, it seems pretty obvious that we are heading for confrontation and it goes without saying that the restoration of the Mau Forest will mean forcefully uprooting thousands of squatter families, compensating them and re-settling them elsewhere. This may sound inhuman to our so-called human rights lobby groups, but it certainly guarantees the future of millions of Kenyans for whom the waters provided by the Mau mean life. Already, the commissioning of the Japanese funded Sondu Miriu hydro power station in Nyanza province has aborted due to low water levels on the river which is as a direct result of the destruction of the Mau Forest. In the already battered tourism sector, the world famous annual Mara Wildebeest migration, dubbed the 7th Wonder of the World, is also severely threatened by human settlement in the Mau.

In 2005, the then NARC government unilaterally sanctioned Kenyan security forces to forcibly evict an estimated 3000 families (about 15,000 people) destroying seven primary schools and affecting thousands of students. The displaced people were left with no access to food, shelter, sanitation facilities or education, and physical infrastructure was also destroyed. According to IDMC, allegations of rape and theft of harvested crops by evicting officers was reported. The brutality in which the evictions were carried out led to the suicide of three people, and one man suffered a heart attack when his school torched. A repeat of these unfortunate events is probably what Kipsigis MPs are concerned about when demanding for acceptable compensation and resettlement. President Kibaki has said that the resettlement will be conducted humanely. PM Raila has also assured that this time the evictions would be given a human face to ensure the fundamental rights of the affected individuals are not violated.

The latest initiative by Prime Minister in forming an all inclusive Mau Forest Conservation Task Force deserves the express support of all Kenyans. The 22 member all-inclusive task force is firstly expected to draw up its own terms of reference through consultations with all stakeholders including residents and then proceed to develop a time-bound implementation plan of evicting, compensating and re-settling those who currently reside in the Mau Forest. Ultimately, government plans to re-demarcate the forest boundaries, fence off the forest and also put in place an effective long-term management plans to reclaim and sustain the jewel that is Mau Forest. The success of these plans will mean that the country will have averted a major economic disaster and unthinkable environmental catastrophe. It will also mean another feather on to RAO's already thickly feathered political cap.

The Government also ought to prosecute all those politicians and public servants who were adversely involved in illegal demarcation of the forest in the first place. I mean, if President Moi ordered these illegal allocations, he must be called into account and made to answer charges of abuse of office!

The recommendations of the Ndungu Report may have been too drastic in suggesting amendments to sections of the constitution to facilitate the formation of a Lands Title Tribunal to enable the revocation and rectification of all irregular title deeds in the Mau and other forest., but it I think is time for us to bite the bullet for the sake of future generations.

Resources: Mau Complex Under Siege: Continuous destruction of Kenya’s largest forest, UNEP, 2005

Secondary School Strikes: Grand Coalition Government Courts More Disaster

It has been fascinating researching into the real causes of the current wave of school strikes that has left many Kenyans numb with shock. The first thing we have realized is just how complex the problem is. The truth is that those looking for a single reason to heap all the blame on will be disappointed because there are actually a number of reasons that have led to the current crisis. However many of them are related.
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Fascinatingly, despite the fact that we are now told that over 300 schools countrywide have been involved in strikes, few Kenyans realize just how serious the problem is. For instance many do not know that in the course of this term alone Upper Hill School students have been on strike twice. The unrest that led to the death of a student was the second one. And so has Sunshine School in Langata.

It is interesting how the local media which has rushed to talk to teachers has generally heaped all the blame on parents who are said to dumb their unruly children in school and leave them to “terrorize” teachers. Surely how can this be true when youngsters spend most of their time at school (a minimum of 9 months out of 12). Would the reverse not be a little more accurate in that teachers who have mostly despaired in many schools across the country are molding the kind of youngster who end up terrorizing parents whenever they are at home. But having said that it is not a smart thing for all the blame to be heaped on any one party. Both share responsibility and it is supposed to be a team effort. Sadly these days, rather than co-operation the two key groups are busy mostly fighting and second-guessing each other at most schools, my investigation has revealed.

From my 3 day investigation I am forced to announce that the number one reason for the current problems in schools is that teachers have mostly abandoned their responsibilities in schools and are too busy trying to make extra money. While it is true that there are various other factors that have contributed to the current crisis including the withdrawal of the cane without an adequate discipline system to replace it, the truth is that if teachers were on the job, they would have sounded the alarm long before the first can of petrol was purchased to burn down anything.

What has in fact happened is that teachers have despaired and are only in schools to do the bear minimum to enable them earn their salaries so that they can re-invest in all kinds of enterprises that occupy their mind and indeed most of their time. There is nothing wrong with a teacher being enterprising, the only problem is that teaching is the kind of profession that does not work with anything less than total dedication.

The reaction of the government to the wave of strikes is bound to make the situation worse. As usual they have rushed to address the symptoms (so that they are seen to be doing something) and nobody is interested in digging out the root cause of this unprecedented crisis. That is why the ministry has banned DVD and CD players in school buses (what does that have to do with the problem?). Indeed they have also opted to charge as many of the students as possible in courts. While I agree that no mercy should be shown to arsonists, the reality is that quite a number of innocent students will get a chance to mix with hard criminals in police cells and you can be sure that they will never be the same again.

A more productive approach would be to start with the teachers and ask them where they were when the students planned and launched their attacks. This will hopefully lead to teachers admitting about their current state of despair which will in turn lead to the issue of the cane (which must be re-introduced). This will be much more useful than banning music in school buses and locking up barely legal youngsters.

P.S. 1 :

In your weekend special this Saturday: How prominent Kenyans made their money. Kenyans worship money and they really don’t care how their leaders made their cash as long as they have plenty of it so that during election campaigns, they can distribute Kshs 50 or even Kshs 5 to voters (when some of them have stolen thousands from each individual Kenyan countrywide). For those interested in the way in which these wealthy well known Kenyans made their money my detailed series of articles this weekend will amaze and surely disgust you. Dump your girl friend or boyfriend for yours truly this weekend (I promise not to disappoint). And let’s meet right here in your one and only Kumekucha Weekend special.

P.S. 2

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P.S. 3

I appeal to regular readers of Kumekucha to remain on high alert and to refuse to be taken in by common trickery, especially in the so-called comments in this blog (and I am NOT talking about the ones coming in from a mental asylum in Spain). I have visited every single blog and web site reporting Kenyan news and I can authoritatively tell you that no other site invites more criticism than this one. But why? Just ask yourself the simple question; why don’t these “unhappy readers” move elsewhere instead of spending the whole day here trying to prove that our articles are either NOT factual or that (this is the latest one) I am recycling old Kumekucha articles. There was an especially amusing incident 2 days ago when some well-trained-in-propaganda-techniques-Kenyan pounced on a single statement in an authentic email I reproduced here, talking about photographs, to suggest that the personal account on a sexual assault by the Kenya police was pure fiction. Co-incidentally on the same day the Daily Nation carried an article (with much less details) confirming that the assault actually took place.

It is also fascinating that the attacks are mainly focused on articles that I write myself and not so much on the other contributors. Some of this chaps lack reading skills because they also pounce on guest posts written by others that I post myself. Anything with Chris’ name at the bottom is earmarked for scrutiny with the intention to attack.

Heheheheheheehe. I know you guys are terribly worried at what I know. Lakini pole sana, I have no intention of holding anything back from my dear readers. So… bring it on!!

I am not one to brag but there is only one possible explanation as to why Kumekucha is the most attacked Kenyan blog on earth. Folks, they fear us too much and with good reason. Keep it here and if you are easily confused by clever propagandists, just skip the comments area and read the posts only and then wait for as long as 2 months for the story to break in other media.