Baraza

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 26 2009 | By: Maina

Today I woke up to the most disturbing news. “Private companies and individuals are gradually encroaching on the Nairobi National Park, threatening the only wildlife habitat close to the city,” says the opening sentence of an article in the Kenyan newspaper, Daily Nation’s website.

Previous cattle invasion in the Park during drought

According to the journalist,  Fred Mukindia, an 11,700 hectares area had been surveyed and some 60 acres (24.75 hectares) would be subdivided into plots to be sold to developers and land title deeds will be issued. This is clearly a fraudulent deal since the land in question is under the title deed held by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) who are the custodians of all national parks including Nairobi. Already the law has been broken since it is illegal to survey any land without the full knowledge and approval of the owner. KWS officers say they did not sanction this survey.

Nairobi National Park is the only wildlife national park within a capital city in the world. The park has however been under pressure from private developers who want to convert it into residential and commercial area. Most of the wildlife migration corridor between the park and the southern maasailand wildlife areas - including Amboseli National Park - has already been lost to these greedy developers.

There was no legal way to stop these developers from converting the corridors since they were communal lands under the masai group ranch systems and the groups are allowed to sell the land. The park, however, is protected under the Wildlife Management and Conservation Act cap 386, Laws of Kenya. How then can the same government that is supposed to uphold this law allow it to be flouted? The same custodian of this law is preparing to issue titles of ownership to the new ‘grabbers’ in what the Daily Nation journalist refers to as a ‘fast tracked’ process!

Its even more complicated since there are already squatters in the 60 acre land. The journalist postulates that these are not genuine landless people but decoys planted on the piece of wild real estate to create public empathy until the gluttonous developers get the title deeds. This is not unusual in Kenya as we have seen in the Mau Forest, where phony squatters were used by rich land speculators resulting in the speculators being allocated colossal tracts of land in this most important water catchment.

The journalist also blames the KWS who, while they fenced that side of the park, someone forgot to fence the 60 acre parcel of land thus exposing it to land-hungry grabbers. It gets quite messy given that the squatters have started agitating for this land. Recently, the article reports, they have heightened the fight for the land and some KWS officials report to have received death threats. The KWS is said to have responded by deploying armed rangers to the area. The squatters retaliated by uprooting boundary beacons erected around the land. And so the vicious circle continues.

What am asking is, should we allow the government to break the law just because they made and are responsible for upholding these laws? The resounding answer should be NO!

Since this illegal land allocation appears to be a ‘clandestine’  operation, the first line of attack should be to create public outcry from all levels. Kenyan conservation organizations should lead the public in rejecting this dangerous move that threatens to set precedence for the future grabbing of wildlife habitats. If this is allowed to go on, nothing can stop other land thieves from stealing the entire Nairobi National Park - the Wildlife Capital of The World.

The time to act is now, before the process of issuing land ownership titles is complete. It would be helpful if conservation organizations (including KWS) would file a case in the Kenyan High Court to stop the title processing as a first step, then make a BIG noise about this illegal activity that threatens to take away Nairobi’s primary green gem.