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.
MORDECAI OGADA explains why black Africans are almost completely absent in the field of conservation in Kenya, which has been hijacked by whites and foreigners who pander to prejudices that have been cultivated by romantic or colonial notions about Africa and its wildlife.
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 […]
London, UK EIGHT MILLION ACRES OF THE COUNTRY’S BEST LAND It was a potentially explosive situation. A few hundred white farmers held over eight million acres of the country’s best land, and memories were fresh of a guerrilla war to dispossess them. Over 6,000 British troops had been sent out to protect the farmers and […]
The conflicts in Laikipia and elsewhere in northern Kenya ought to be looked at as a national security issue exacerbated by historical land injustices and the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that relegates the true owners of the resources to the periphery.