Bwana Nkuraya,

  It seems you do understand the dynamics of the IDPs.

  Note that without Majimbo systems in place, no assusrance of the Gikuyus safety anywhere in Kenya or untill the Homeguard give them back the land they grabbed from their fore-fathers ( former Mau Mau fighters)

  In fact the current Internal Displace Persons (IDPs) crisis is flawed with high level of corruption masterminded by the same Mt Kenya Mafia land grabbers, to fraudulently woo compensations from both Kenya government and the international community to their henchmen.

  It is indeed shameful for Kenya government to hurriedly accept to resettle fake IDPs and the grandchildren of the Mau Mau fighters in the Kalenjin land while their own land are in the hands of the Homeguards in the current government.

  Rev Okoth Otura
www.cdmk.org

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Date:  Sat, 3 May 2008 10:04:56 -0700 (PDT)
From:  ndebele okoth
Subject:  Re: Karua, Kibaki Confused in the Resettlement Scheme-Bound to Fail

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Management of land sharing and ownership should be changed
Published on May 4, 2008, 12:00 am
By Dennis Onyango
The Standard | Online Edition |
www.eastandard.net/news/?id=1143985982&cid=4

Way back in 1969 then fiery Member of Parliament for Tinderet the late Jean Marie Seroney began to raise alarm over the way communities were being settled in Nandi Hills and other parts of the Rift Valley.

Seroney, says Lands Minister Mr James Orengo, even issued the Nandi Hills Declaration that demanded none indigenous people to vacate the ancestral land.The Nandi Hills Declaration of 1969 laid claim to all settlement land in the district for the Nandi. His demands went unheeded. Then President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta used a combination of coercion and divide-and-rule to neutralise such opposition.

He started parcelling out land to other ethnic groups and thus winning their allegiance. But the matter never died. The fury erupted again in 1991 and 1992 clashes, where non-Kalenjin communities were evicted from parts of the Rift Valley. It recurred in 1997, the run-up to 2002 General Election.  The violence occurred again in pockets of settlement schemes in the Rift Valley before last elections, and then erupted into near a civil war when the election results were declared in favour of President Kibaki.

Lands Minister, Mr James Orengo, like many others, believes it is not over yet.On Monday, the Government will begin to take people back to the lands from where they were uprooted between December last year and February.
The process begins with the dismantling of all tents in the camps housing IDPs, to make people “go back to their farms without any further delay”.
The resettlement is being done under the Operation Rudi Nyumbani programme, co-ordinated by Rift Valley PC, Mr Noor Hassan.

Although the displacement is understood to have been caused by deep running suspicions over land, the Ministry of Special Programmes, with limited participation of the Ministry of Lands, is undertaking the resettlement programme. Some people see history repeating itself.
Orengo, who was sympathetic to Seroney’s ideas, then, agrees that there is a land dimension to the crisis he describes as “perennial”, coming before or after General Elections.  Land and its ownership, Orengo says, is what will destroy Kenya, unless there is a change in the style of its sharing and ownership.

“The appetite for land is not limited to the poor and the landless. Even those who have land have an insatiable thirst for more. It is those who have land who keep looking for more,” Orengo says.
He explains: “There are people who own land in the Rift Valley, Central, Coast and Eastern provinces. The big land owners own land everywhere.”
Why Rift Valley has been particularly explosive, the minister says, has to do with how other communities settled in the region.
“When whole communities get implanted in areas ordinarily associated with another community, there is resentment. Kenyatta put little effort in making the communities bond,” Orengo says.

Need for public education

The minister elaborates: “There was need for some kind of public education and advocacy to make the two communities live together. It was not done. Kenyatta went out dishing title deeds to communities that were moving into the Rift Valley. The locals never took it kindly.”

The resentment in the Rift Valley, the Lands minister says, would replicate itself anywhere else if the resettlement was done in a similar way.”If you took thousands of people from Nyanza and put them in a village in Kiambu, the locals would not like it. That phenomenon is not unique. Even in the US, the land of freedom, there is usually resentment when large numbers of immigrants flow in. It is the same in Europe,” Orengo said in an interview.

The man whose ministry is responsible for issuing land title deeds, says the problem in the Rift Valley, is not about title deeds or the constitutional rights of Kenyans to settle anywhere. It is about how communities have or have not integrated.  Orengo says the starting point, when it comes to Rift Valley, is for the authorities to accept that there is a problem that defies willing buyer, willing seller logic.

“There are many parts of this country where communities have come together and they are living in harmony. There are Luhyas in Uriri in Migori District. There has never been a problem. There are Luos in parts of Western, among the Banyala and there has been no problem. They inter-marry. They have fitted in the same churches. This has not happened in the Rift Valley.”In the Rift Valley, according to one senior politician, communities that moved in “transferred their villages” with them and real mingling never occurred.

“The farms were named after the places they came from. The church that was burnt in Eldoret was located in a place they named Kiambaa. There are schools there like Gitwamba and Rironi. It has been a case of living together and living apart at the same time,” the MP says.
The problem, according to the Lands minister, is in the way communities were settled there.”The Luo who live with the Banyala or the Luhya who live with Luos in Uriri were not transferred en masse and planted among the people. They came progressively and settled. The opposite was the case in the Rift Valley,” Orengo said.

“You may turn to the Constitution and say people are free to live where they feel like. It all sounds very good. But that is not how people feel. We must try and help communities bond,” the minister explains.

Land-related problems

Orengo’s sentiments echo those of US ambassador to Kenya Mr Michael Ranneberger.In an interview last week, Ranneberger said the violence that followed the poll results, was “overwhelmingly, almost absolutely” land related.  Land reform, the ambassador said, is one of the most critical challenges the coalition faces.

“The violence was not about ethnic hatred. Some of it was a reaction to the disputed election results. But a tremendous amount of that violence was about land. Sometimes, it takes just a spark to trigger a mighty fire that was waiting to burn. That is what happened,” Ranneberger said.  The ambassador said the land question would involve dealing with issues like population growth, surveys indicating who actually owns what and industrialisation so that all Kenyans do not have to depend on land for a living.  He proposed a solution different from what the Government begins tomorrow.

“People have to reconcile. Get elders involved; convince each other that there will be mutual benefits when everyone returns. If you are going to give seeds to members of the displaced Kikuyu community, there are schools and clinics children of the Kalenjin attend, rehabilitate those and let the good be shared. That is the way to reconcile communities.”Orengo says there is tremendous feeling of betrayal over land, especially in Central Province. If the minister had his way, the starting point in resettling the displaced people from Central Province would have been to buy them land in the province they originated from. That would have historical significance.

“The people of central Kenya fought to recover their land from the British. Mau Mau even had a Land Freedom Army. They were fighting to recover their ancestral land, which the wazungu had taken. They were not fighting to get land in the Rift Valley. There should have been an effort to settle communities in the regions where they shed blood for their land,” Orengo said. The Lands minister says resettlement cannot be done “by the force of arms”, and he fears that if some form of harmonisation is not done, there will be trouble again, come 2012. You may resettle them using the force of arms. But come another election, there will be trouble. That has been the pattern,” the minister said.

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Date:  Sat, 3 May 2008 14:20:12 -0700 (PDT)
From:  owinga bonfas
Subject:  The Truth About Land Issue in Riftvalley