{UAH} Land will not solve problem of IDPs; just give each of them a fat cheque

http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Land+will+not+solve+problem+of+IDPs/-/440808/1980052/-/1geraf/-/index.html

 

By Charles Onyango-Obbo
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Two issues have bounced back in the news in Kenya in the past few days.

One is the vexing matter of how to settle, once and for all, the Kenyans who were internally displaced (IDPs) by the post-election violence of 2008. The other came to us from the Coast after President Kenyatta handed out 60,000 land titles to residents there.

Land is a hot political potato in Coast, so when former Prime Minister and Opposition leader Raila Odinga accused the President of playing cynical politics with the land titles, we had the usual fireworks. The good thing with being a columnist who is not planning to stand for elections is that you can annoy people with heretic and unpopular ideas and they cannot vote against you (except perhaps with their pockets if they do not like your paper).

So, here we go. My homeland, Uganda, once had the world's largest displaced population in the world — all 1.6 million of them. Just like Kenya, resettling them became a big issue and the government and the donors threw hundreds of millions of dollars at it.

Resettling — and compensating — IDPs is the right thing morally, politically, and legally to do. Where Kenya, like Uganda, is getting it wrong is the insistence in trying to find land in some villages and resettling them there.

One of Africa's problems is that we have too many villagers and peasants, eking out a pittance on tired lands. After a few months, most IDPs usually develop a sub-economy of their own. Hustlers emerge from the camps, as do loan sharks, small-time traders, and all sorts of honest and crooked businesses.

Before long, the smarter IDPs build shacks and small houses that are more comfortable and convenient than their tents on the edge of the camp and move out. A small town usually develops. The more forward-looking policy, I sense, would be for the government to buy the land around IDP camps and develop it into urban areas with modern economies. People should not be sent back to the land to become peasants again.

In Kenya's case, there is something else about the IDP camps. I have followed closely a series of programmes on the IDP camps and one of the things most of the camps are proud of are that they are multi-ethnic.

Dismantling the camps altogether and dispersing people to the villages is, thus, to dissolve multi-ethnic communities and send them to monolithic, often narrow-minded, parts of the country, where they get to rediscover and reinforce the worst prejudices about Kenyans who are not from their tribe.

Which brings us to the question of land. The resettlement of IDPs in part has to do with our emotional attachment to land. Land completes the African. Or does it?

Land is like slums. Those of us who mean well usually support "slum improvement" or "slum upgrading" schemes. But nearly everywhere in Africa, slum dwellers who have got new improved houses have rented them out… and often moved to another slum or created one. In the Ugandan capital, Kampala, in one slum improvement, the dwellers cashed in and moved to a new floating slum that they created in a swamp!

Most slum dwellers do not need new houses, just like landless people do not necessary need land. They both want the same thing — title. With the title, they can cash in.

Some years ago the government in Uganda dismantled a famous ranching scheme in the western part of the country. Some of the ranchers had up to 10 square kilometres each while nearby nomads squatted on half-acres.

The ranches were divided among the landless squatters.

Today, there are ranches that are bigger than the ones the government dismantled in that area. The redistribution did not fail. As far as the former squatters were concerned, they got what they wanted — title. Most of them sold their land for a profit and moved on. Some settled as squatters in wetlands in the southern and northeastern parts of the country and caused new problems.

Social engineering is a tough job, in part because we human beings are complicated creatures. However, money tends to cause, but also solve, quite a few of our problems. The IDPs and landless people at the Coast could all do with one thing; a big fat cheque each. They know best what they want to lose or spend their money on.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com& twitter:cobbo3
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Ocen Nekyon

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