THE PRIME MINISTER, RAILA ODINGA SHOULD NOT BE BLAMED INDIVIDUALLY OVER THE GOVERNMENT EVICTION EXERCISES AGAINST ILLEGAL SETTLERS IN MAU FOREST

Commentary By Leo Odera Omolo

Any sane person watching the Television news footage would agree in principle, that the majority of faces of people streaming out of Mau Forest Complex are old people in their advanced ages, beyond sixties and seventies.

At least these people have some places where they came from. If that is the case, then why can’t they go back to where they belong?

The aquisition of land in this one of the five water towers in Kenya, and the settlement, only began in the 1990s. This defeats all the logics and spirited argument being advanced by a section of the Rift Valley MPs, especially when they are saying that these people have no land elsewhere to go back to. Where were they all these years? I am sure they did not come from heaven the other day and landed on Mau forest.

In this context, I concur with the Forestry Minister, Dr. Noah Wekesa’s contention that the so-called landless Mau settlers had their ancestral family land elsewhere. And as such, they should pack their belongings and voluntarily vacate the forestland without causing much fuss and hullabaloo.

Such exercise would give the government the breathing space to plan well and search for land on which it could settle those with genuine cases of landlessness.

For this reason, however, I have in mind the Ogiek, the genuine forest dwellers and gatherers community, who have lived in the Mau, and other forests in this country for close to between 200 and 300 years. The Ogiek people deserve to be given priority when the government considers its next land plot allocation programme in the Rift Valley and elsewhere.

The other group or category of landless people who the government gives its due care and priority are the Laibons {Orkoik or Talaek}. These are the sub-clans of the much revered Koitalel Arap Samoei, the Nandi hero who fought the White colonialist, and resisted the British authority for nine years, before he was eventually betrayed and lured into a stage managed peace meeting, where he was shot and killed in 1905.

The Laibons are a very special community of sorcerers , astrologers as well as witchdoctors, were in 1934, on falsified accusation by colonial chiefs and white missionaries , rounded up and bundled out of their ancestral land in Nandi, Kipsigis and Tugen regions. Hundred of their families were forcefully exiled into the remotest Gwassi Hills in the then South Nyanza district. Some of the Laibons were taken to Mfangano Island. Their prominent leaders were detained by colonialists in Nyeri, and Kodiaga prisons in Kisumu, where they died under the harsh prisons conditions, and some, of old age.

But in 1960, the then member of the white dominated Colonial Legislative Council for Kipsigis, the late Dr. Taaitta Araap Toweett, moved a motion in the Legco, which received unanimous support and backing of all the then 14 Legco African elected members, Asians , Arab members, as well as moderate European members, requesting the Colonial Office in London, and the then Governor of Kenya, Sir Patrick Muir Renson, to revoke the thirty year old deportation order against the Kalenjin Laibons, so that they may rejoin their communities back home.

Toweett’s motion was accepted by the colonial administration, and in 1961, the Laibons started their long journey of moving out of Gwassi Hills and back to their homes of origins in Kericho , Nandi and Tugen regions.

Unfortunately, when these people got back to their home districts of origin before they were exiled, they found that their land had already been seized and taken by other people during the land consolidation exercises in those regions. And the new settlers, who had already settled on the land for close to 30 years, had already become the legal owners and colonialist did nothing to help the Laibons resettled among their communities.

Few wealthy ones managed to secure pieces of land which they bought at very exorbitant prices. The majority became landless and destitute, and are still living in camps within Kericho Municipality. Others went back to Nandi and settled at Kapsisiyo, in Nandi North district, while other moved and settled in Koibatek.

To-date, close to 200 families are still living like destitutes in a camp within Kericho Municipality. Here is where they have lived ever since they returned from Gwassi Hills in 1961. The late Kipkalya Kones, at one time, while serving in the former KANU regime as a powerful Minister of State in the Office of the President, had made a spirited effort to have these people settled in Ndabibi area, in Narok North. But the Maasais, led by William Ole Ntimama, could hear none of this move.

All the community predicaments facing the Kalenjin illegal settlement in Mau did not come about because of the actions of the Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The criticism now being leveled on the Prime Minister are misdirected, unwarranted and unjustifiable. It is therefore wrong for anyone to use the Prime Minister as his or their scapegoat for their own failures.

Instead, the Kalenjin MPs should engage the government constructively, and secure a good deal for their people, instead of too much politicking, for the purpose of gaining cheap publicity and political mileage. This is completely wrong, and if the Kalenjin community is going to rely on these kind mediocrity leadership, then the community is heading to doom.

Mr Odinga’s role in Mau is only to implement the government decision and policy, and therefore, should not be singled out for scathing criticism and wholesale condemnation. It is also a common knowledge that those in the forefront, and speaking the loudest about the Mau, are all serving selfish interests. The majority of the MPs are the beneficiaries of Mau Forest land grabbing.

How about the thousands of hectares of the fertile and prime Kalenjin ancestral land on which the large scale tea plantations stand on in the South Rift and Nandi districts? Were these farms also dished out to the multinational Tea Companies by Mr.Odinga?

I am sure Raila was nowhere on this planet in the 1912 and 1920s, when these farms were forcefully seized by colonialists and white settlers from the Kipsigis and the Nandis at gun-point. Why can’t Hon Isaac Ruto and Hon Joshua Kutuny return these prime farm lands to the rightful owners and re-settle their people on these tea estates?

Surely, such a move could be more logical than issuing childish threats of returning the doomed settlers to the forest within two weeks if the government did not provide them with the alternative in which they can be settled. Why all these pipe dreams?

None of the Kalenjin MPs openly speaks about the Tea farms, but some of them, it is being alleged, sneak into the tea company bosses compounds only in the evenings, in search of cheap handouts.

A true and dynamic leader, who makes tough decisions, irrespective of its outcome, but for the interest of the present and future generations, obviously that man is a hero.

One Kalenjin MP made a childish remark, insinuating that Mr Odinga is seeking international recognition by evicting the Kalenjin settlers from Mau. What kind of recognition, particularly to a politician of Mr. Odinga’s calibre?

The time is up for some of the present crops of Kalenjin Mps, who, it seems, need to mature up from political novices, to dynamism political leadership. Preaching the gospel of hatred and incitement cannot build a strong and united Kenyan nation. Moreover the Rift Valley is not the exclusive of the Kalenjin alone. It is a cosmopolitan region where Kenyans from all other communities have settled., and are therefore contributing immensely towards the real task of nation building.

Hollow and shallow argument of this magnitude, and fire-spiting inflammatory utterances, such which were made by several Kalenjin Mps, and political operative via Kass FM Kalenjin vernacular Radio  Station, against Mr Odinga can only fuel communal hatred among the diverse Kenyan communities. And yet we still need each other.

Please the Rift Valley politicians, you must stop using the ODM party as a ransom bait for power bargain and also stop being petty.

Ends
leooderaomolo@yahoo.com

About the author: LEO ODERA OMOLO is a veteran Kenyan journalist, who is living on semi-retirement, but at times operating from the lakeside Kenyan City of  Kisumu, and regularly writing comments on diverse topics.