Baraza

Category: Forests, Mau Forest Complex, National Parks and protected areas, tourism, wildlife | Date: Sep 24 2008 | By: Maina

The power struggles that have characterized the intended eviction of illegal - and perceived legal - squatters from the Mau Complex in Kenya are now degenerating into some really nasty verbal offensives between politicians. On Tuesday, 23 September the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, the Standard and other media reported that the Mau complex was threatening the unity of the ODM Party. The Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is Kenya’s Prime Minister’s party and has a majority in parliament.

The Mau, one of Kenya’s most important water catchments has been invaded by up to 15,000 families whose eviction - even with the nationwide acceptance that they have to leave - has proved to be extremely challenging for the government. Some of them do indeed have genuine land title deeds. Notwithstanding how fraudulently they acquired them, these are legal government documents that cannot just be wished away. That is why the squatters have stayed put. They say they will only move out when they are compensated for the land they own inside the Mau. They don’t want money, they want land: alternative land.

Now the urgency of evicting these families is creeping in on every Kenyan, and the politicians know this. Politicians being politicians, they see an opportunity to score some career mileage. They are now using the Mau saga - or more so the poor who were sold the land that should not have been sold in the first place - to muscle up their political ambitions. If the event of this Tuesday are anything to go by, then we are in for a lengthy soap opera with a tragic end. Not the happily ever after kind.

Tuesday’s media reports of the emerging cracks in ODM are based on a chain of events that were set into motion by their leader, Prime Minister Raila Odinga when he announced that the squatters have to leave. The situation got worse when Raila, now increasingly getting frustrated by the politicisation of the Mau debacle publicly threatened to name and shame former Kenya African National Union (KANU) stalwarts who he purports are the main beneficiaries of the irregular allocations of land inside the Mau. Most of the remnants of this once powerful party - especially those who stuck with it towards the end of former President Daniel arap Moi’s regime in the late 1990s are now in ODM and they were not amused by the Prime Minister’s uttering.

KANU ruled this country since independence in 1963 until it was dislodged from power during the 2002 euphoric general elections by the then newly formed National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) party. Towards the end of its authoritarian rule, KANU was blamed for having dragged this country through murky decades of economic plunder and stifled democracy. They are said to have acquired colossal swathes of land and Raila believes that, in the same manner, they own most of the Mau land in question.

The situation is so bad such that the Member of Parliament (MP) for Chepalungu Constituency in the expansive Rift Valley Province (where the Mau is located), Honourable Isaac Ruto, is actively campaigning for a candidate from a rival party to ODM for the comming by-elections that were necessitated by the death of a couple of MPs. Isaac was elected to parliament on an ODM ticket. He accuses the Prime Minister of betraying the people who enabled him get to power. Isaac Ruto’s brother, Hounorable Willam Ruto, is credited for having delivered the Rift Valley voting block that sealed the ODM’s parliamentary majority at the end of the hotly contested 2007 general elections in Kenya. Both were former KANU men.

To say that anyone can fully understand the complicated politics that are eating the Mau would be too ambitious. One columnist in the Standard has tried to explain the problem here. I don’t seek to understand these shenanigans. I seek only to see the squatters relocated away from this vital water tower in the most humane manner. The genuine squatters, especially the poor farmers who were duped into buying the land, should be given land elsewhere and immediate forest restoration should start - today. I wonder what will happen to the traditional hunter gatherer minority - the Ogiek - who’ve lived in that forest for eons.

Without the Mau - for example - the Masai Mara will not be the same. The Mara River will not flow. Maybe the wildebeest will stop their annual migration to the Mara and back to Serengeti in Tanzania. Maybe northern Serengeti will die. Maybe.

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Tags: community, Forests, Kenya, Masai Mara, Mau Forest Complex, politics, tourism

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Category: Forests, tourism | Date: Aug 22 2008 | By: Maina

For years now, the controversy of whether or not to evict squatters in the Mau Forest Complex in southwestern Kenya has been played by politicians to their own gain. The problem at the Mau has survived four general (parliamentary and presidential) elections so far, and it doesn’t seem to be going away.

Allow me to introduce you to the largest, near-continuous montane forest block in East Africa before I tell you what the problem is (or is thought to be). The Mau is huge and critically important to the three East African states of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The forests cloak the western slopes, and part of the crest, of the Mau Escarpment, a block of raised land that forms the western wall of the Gregory Rift Valley, rising steeply from the floor and sloping away more gradually to the west. There are five main Forest Reserves: Eastern, Western and South-western Mau (c.66,000, 22,700 and 84,000 ha respectively), Trans-Mara (34,400 ha) and Ol Pusimoru (17,200 ha).

A sixth large block, the Maasai Mau (c.46,000 ha) is as yet ungazetted. In early 2001, a total of 59,134 ha (35,301 in Eastern Mau, 22,797 ha in South-western Mau, 713 ha in Western May and 1,030 ha in Western Mau) was designated for degazettement meaning it would be removed from protection status and left to the dogs.

Now here is the problem. Since the ill advised forest excisions of the late 1990s (to settle landless people), thousands of people have invaded the forest and laid waste to large swathes of especially the eastern Mau. The government led resettlement is said to have brought some 28,000 households into the eastern Mau. This settlement of agricultural communities also opened up the forest to a large racket of illegal logging that has contributed to the loss of about 28% of forest cover in the eastern sector (cumulative since 1967).

The 28,000 may not be removed since they are there “legally” and so the target for eviction is those considered “illegal squarters”. Attempts to remove these aliens have had casualties in government and politics. President Kibaki’s attempt to remove them during his first term - about three years ago - cost him the constitutional referendum that was seeking to usher in a new constitution for Kenyans. Then in December 2007 when Kenyans voted - in what was to turn into the bloodiest election ever - Kibaki’s opponents used the Mau again to make him unpopular. Lots of lesser politicians have fallen and others gained political favour because of the Mau.

The Mau problems are multifaceted. There is the obvious environmental degradation concern, there is also a community face whereby the Kipsigis (who are majority squarters) claim that they bought their land in the Mau and the Maasai who an ancestral claim to the Mau. The community card is the politicians pet and has been used to divide these two communities in an annoyingly predictable patterns. There is also the Ogiek, who are thought to be the indegenous people of the forest and are traditionally hunter-gatherers. The Ogiek are a minority and were evicted from the forest in the 1980s

Due to the immense importance of the Mau as a one the five most important “water towers” in Kenya, there are economical ramifications to consider. The Mau issue have never - in the public eye - been seen as an environmental issue, but recently, as it increasingly becomes clear that environmental degradation has economic repercussions, the environmental aspect has begun to get noticed.

Picture this: Numerous streams originate from the forests west of the scarp crest, forming part of the Sondu and Mara river systems, which flow into Lake Victoria, and the Southern Ewaso Ngiro system, which flows into Lake Natron. The Eastern Mau is the main watershed for Lake Nakuru, through the Njoro, Makalia and Enderit rivers. Take the out the Mara River alone and you don’t have the Masai Mara (as we know it) and parts of the Serengeti, northern Tanzania. That is bad for the multi-billion tourism industry in Kenya and Tanzania.

The Mau complex has complex problems and the political tug-of-wars are not helping. If we dont stop the destruction of the Mau, millions of people will suffer. Only several thousand people have invaded the Mau, but millions downstream will suffer the consequences.

Recently, the Kenya’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, announced the formation of a Task Force to chart a way forward in the removal of the squatters. It consists of some high profile conservationists together with the usual political puppets. We hope the environmentalists will prevail and a people-friendly and environmentally sound formula is found to remove the squatters.

One thing is clear, and the Mr Odinga said it: there are no two ways of saving the Mau. The only way to save the Mau is to remove those folk from the forest and protect it against illegal logging.

I will keep an eye open to see what the Task Force comes up with.

To learn more about the Mau there are several links:
1. A Birdlife Perspective
2. Mau in the News
3. More news on the Mau
There is also a community group that is trying to save the Mau and see also the story of the Ogiek
You can also download a report done by the UNEP about the destruction of the Mau here

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Tags: community, Forests, Kenya, Masai Mara, Mau Complex, tourism

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Category: Mara Triangle, tourism | Date: Aug 19 2008 | By: Maina

In a rather unusual event, Kenya’s top guy ‘migrated’ with a large portion of his clan into the Masai Mara this Sunday to see the the popular Wildebeest Migration from the Serengeti to the Mara. Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki - amusingly described by Tourism Minister, Najib Balala, as Tourist Number 1 - seemed to have had a ball down there. I hear that the migration is particularly thick this season and the accompanying wildlife is superb. Well you just need to look at Paula’s post to see the magnificent images she brought back just a few days before the country’s CEO pointed his family towards the Mara River.

In President Kibaki’s words “It is a wonderful world, wonderful indeed and of course it is wonderful for me to be here,”

President Kibaki is in blue floral shirt.

It was big news here in Kenya and most of us suspended (voluntarily) our evening activities either at 7pm (for the news in Kiswahili) or at 9pm (for the English version) to watch the not-so-often-in-the-news president and his grand children relaxed and watching game. And the man seems to be having lots of fun. Picture this: it is common knowledge that the President hardly ever gives a one-on-one interview with the press. He avoids the press like the plague. But the sight of tons of gnu spread out into the horizon must have softened his heart and he gave an uncharacteristically jovial interview with Linus Kaikai of Kenya’s premier private TV station, KTN. The migration can have this effect on people.

Its a good thing for Kenya’s tourism when the top mwananchi*is publicly seen visiting the Mara. It definitely will encourage us, middle-class Kenyans, to visit our country (we’re conspicuously absent in tourist spots - except as tour guides and hotel staff). His appeal to the international community to come visit the Country, and the Mara, is also welcome given that the tourism industry is yet to recover from the traumatic post-election violence that shocked the whole world early this year. According to reports however it seems that the recovery has been much faster than expected although we are not there yet.

The Mara remains the top wildlife tourism destination in East Africa and such high profile endorsement might be of help to such places as the Mara Triangle that have been struggling to get back on their feet after the crippling effects of the violence.

Read more about the Presidents visit to the Masai Mara here and here

*mwananchi is citizen in Kiswahili

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Tags: Kenya, Masai Mara, migration, Mwai Kibaki, President, Serengeti, tourism, wildebeest

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