Violent evictions of families from their homes are not exceptional events. They go to the heart of Kenya’s political economy and its long history of valorising the rights of those who hold private title.
Land adjudication is the megaphone that is heralding the dismantling of the pastoralist way of life and wildlife conservation is a ploy to sedentarise pastoralists.
The Land Value Act does not make provision for the valuation of communal land in a manner that reflects the social-economic practices of the drylands communities.
The story of how the defunct Uplands Bacon factory lost its land to Farmers Choice is a sad case of how the Moi government was either unable or unwilling to protect lucrative subsectors of the economy. Now, despite an NLC order, Farmers Choice has refused to hand back the land to pig farmers in Kiambu County.
Proponents of wildlife conservancies in Northern Kenya argue that they provide a win-win situation for both conservation and pastoralist communities. However, the current push to establish more conservancies in the region may backfire and lead to more conflict.
As part of Isiolo County, the land in Biliqo-Bulesa is just a small proportion of the more than 60 per cent of the country where land adjudication has hardly started. So anyone with the financial muscle and the ability to command the backing of top political kingpins in the country can lay claim to vast tracts of land there and thereby disinherit communities, some of whom have inhabited the region since the 10th century.
A 2012 production by Xmedia, directed by Robby Bresson for Akiba Mashinani Trust. "MUKUHURU" follows the investigations of a group of disenfranchised youths from Kenya's second largest informal settlement (Mukuru) as they try to discover who owns the land that they have lived on all their lives. Through a series of critical interviews, the youths discover the historical, political, legal and social hurdles that stand in the way of land ownership and security of tenure for all landless in Kenya.
A public law model retrieves Kenyans’ hopes for a different and better way to manage and administer land as the commission enters its next phase.
As the theatre of the politics of succession leading to 2022 plays out in the expansive Rift Valley region, the spectre of the ever-simmering land question looms large.
Recent calls for secession by politicians from Kenya’s coast region point to deep-seated grievances that go back at least one hundred years. Many of these grievances are related to landlessness and historical injustices that have yet to be resolved and which have been consistently underplayed by successive governments.
I was twelve years old when the first invasions of white-owned farms by Zimbabwe’s war veterans were announced on television. The year was 2000. What followed, a decade in which we experienced the spiralling of the Zim dollar and the subsequent food shortages, electricity and water rationing, as well as political violence, was a kind […]
Sometimes when I see an acacia tree, if the location is just right, I am transported back to my first home. For a moment, despite the heat and the dust, I see another scene, a rocky hillside brown with heather and a different kind of tree, a Scots Pine. My two homes, the highlands of […]