{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Can Uhuruto solve Kikuyu land quest? | The Star
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Can Uhuruto solve Kikuyu land quest?
Following on the entirely predictable withdrawal of the charges against President Uhuru Kenyatta at the International Criminal Court, a lot of ink has gone into analysing whether the Jubilee political alliance will survive the fact that the case against Deputy President William Ruto is nowhere near resolved.
Kenyan political psychology being what it is, it seems obvious enough that the Kalenjin community, in the fullness of time, is bound to feel that it has been 'betrayed' – unless Ruto too is promptly let off the hook.
But it seems to me simplistic to assume that only an unfavourable outcome for Ruto at the ICC could break up Jubilee. It is entirely possible that the breakup could come over something else. Or that Jubilee could remain tightly focused and united despite Ruto's ICC nightmare continuing into the indefinite future.
I think a far more important question is: Will the Jubilee alliance pull off the political miracle of making the Rift Valley a safe place for small-scale farmers – specifically those indigenous to Central Kenya – to regain their property and live in peace?
That surely is an agenda which even those who despise Jubilee and continuously seek to delegitimise it can get behind. The mass evictions of the Rift Valley Kikuyu in 2008 is a national tragedy that sooner or later must be addressed. Indeed, doing so is a historical obligation for the Jubilee government.
Not that it will be easy. Kenya's land problem has deep and complex roots.
As I have previously outlined in these pages, historically, all Kenyan tribes fell into two broad categories: there were the agrarian or farming communities and the pastoral or cattle-herding communities. And each of these had their ways of life which set out opposing definitions of land ownership.
As far as the pastoralists were concerned, any land on which they passed as they grazed their large herds of cattle belonged to them. And as these nomadic communities were inclined to wander over rangelands that were hundreds of kilometres in both width and length, they effectively claimed vast tracts of the best land as their communal property.
Even if the land in question was swamplands or river deltas which they only came to every decade or so, when the rains failed, as far as these pastoralists were concerned, that too was their land.
But then there are the farming communities: up to just a few decades ago, the traditional way for a farmer to extend his land holdings was to go out into the forest and carve out a new farm by clearing the trees and bushes.
As most farming communities stay in the same place for long periods, there was rarely much dispute as to who owned what parcel of land: any acreage that a farmer had hacked out of virgin forest or ploughed for a few seasons was his by right.
A century or so ago, none of this mattered. What is now modern-day Kenya is estimated to have had only around two million people living in it at the beginning of the 20th century; and the mortality rate was so high that the population did not rise far above that figure from one decade to another.
As such there was plenty of land for everybody.
But over the next 100 years there was a great change. Following on colonisation, and the introduction of modern medicine, by independence in 1964, there were an estimated seven million Kenyans. And right now there are about 44 million of us – and of this number, about 70 per cent are small-scale farmers.
This has led to ever-increasing demand for farmland – and in recent years, the question of 'ancestral land' has become a major issue, with many tribal communities (and, especially, the historically nomadic-pastoral communities) demanding that any land owned by their ancestors prior to colonisation in the late 19th century should now revert to them.
In most cases, this is land which has either since been dedicated to some national park, or else has been owned and farmed for the last 40 to 50 years by other Kenyans who really have nothing else to rely on.
These underlying tensions about land are often the real reason for the sporadic outbreaks of inter-tribal violence. They certainly were a major factor in the more sustained violence following the December 27, 2007 presidential election.
By all accounts, this is not a problem that will go away anytime soon. And this is the problem which Ruto and Uhuru must address.
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