Mau Forest Exposes Raila Odinga’s Slyness

By HENRY GICHABA
Published August 3, 2009

It is not quite fair to describe Kenya as a lawless country ruled by the whims of value judgment. However, let me premise the piece of tattered cloth, the Constitution of the Republic of Kenya, is no more able than a toilet tissue to complete its purpose and be discarded after a visit to the johns.

I refer to Mau Forest, to Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s list of shame. It unveils the biggest land grabbing scandal since Jomo Kenyatta’s post-independence land-smuggling Gema fraternity. Mr. Odinga’s list exhumes a scandal where 49 prominent individuals and companies have been allocated free chunks of land in the heart of Mau Forest.

Mau Forest is government land. It belongs to you and me. Allocating public land to individuals without due constitutional process is corruption. Yet it is not just about the putrefaction of this pristine natural resource much as it is putting Kenya’s hydrating ability in the grave when the Mau Forest is vanished.

It’s important to know that only one third of Kenya isn’t arid. With the destruction of the Mau Forest, our foremost water catchment, our children and posterity will be Touregs in a Sahara desert made by our generation’s greed. Nonetheless, I partially exonerate the hoi polloi for their inability to access the means of executing massive corruption.

On the maximum, a swathe of close to 400,000 hectares of Mau Forest has been hewed and corruptly dished to our past and present leaders. Many of the recipients have in turn subdivided the chunks they obtained illegally and sold to unsuspecting buyers.

Each of the 49 major land grabbers was allocated more than 20 hectares in the Mau in Nakuru and Narok districts. The obvious implication is thousands of smaller grabbers occupying less than 20 hectares each didn’t make it to Mr. Odinga’s list of shame.

Land title deeds given to the grabbers were legally processed by the government of Kenya. Subsequent buyers of the Mau Forest completed legal purchases and paid for their pieces of land. The bigger thieves made a killing, pocketed their loot and disappeared.

Most of the unholy title deeds were awarded in 2001 by Daniel Arap Moi’s administration. At this time, Mr. Odinga had been Langata MP 11. It is not clear if the parliamentarian raised a finger as Mau was hewed “like carcass for hounds” and dished to the vampires of the system which he was part of.

Now the PM, a keen political craftsman, has sprung onto the Mau Forest scene like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day. That he is so much on the defense arguing for the compensation of occupiers of the Mau Forest contradicts justification.

The PM is judging like a hurricane over the eviction from the Mau Forest of the 49 individuals and companies on his list of shame. And the compensation of thousands of “holier-than-thou” lesser occupiers not implicated on his list. Mr. Odinga presents the face of a grieving mother with a lamp, circling above the burning Mau Forest where black smoke has banished the sun of justice and fairness from shining on our citizenry.

This is the perfect day of his politics. This is the day to shape political wiliness upon. Cutting his niche by the absurd virtuosity of being blind to the tribulations of the IDPs he helped create at the expense of compensating the corrupt land deals of the Mau. Perfection in double standards will never be more refined than in Mr. Odinga’s political maneuvers.

Out of old habit I have looked at the PM’s political record. It is as burnt-looking as the destroyed Mau Forest, its clothing scorched and black. He is the walking dead in a horror film; Kenyans the dead. The PM, the virtuoso playing a role in their death, but attempting to resuscitate those long in comatose.

I have come to see a message in each such late development by Mr. Odinga – a message and a warning, and so this tableau of the slain and the devoured does prove to be. It is not accurate for Mr. Odinga to say he is ready to “pay the price” for exposing the Mau land scandal.

If there was sacrifice for the PM, it would be to address the plight of the IDPs, and the massacred countrymen after the 2007 elections – and a long history of squatters in Kenya. He wants us to place hope for change in Kenya where there’s no reason to. He wants us to believe that with him Kenya’s decadent situation will be bright whereas we know the situation grows darker daily.

Since the Mau Forest saga’s inferno started raging, the Minister for Lands and Settlement James Orengo has been lost in long hibernation. The Orengo of old’s fiery nature has been so unaccountably cooled to the point that he has forgotten he is the chief executive of Kenya’s Lands and Settlement – including the Mau Forest. But Mr. Orengo, just like Mr. Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki, has failed to address Kenya’s land problems.

Did something happen to lawyer Orengo such that he is no longer able to run the lands portfolio? This is the man whose legal expertise we could depend on to interpret the land laws to save the Mau Forest. If an actor can’t play his role, it’s time to quit the stage.

Bishop Lawi Imathiu, chairman of equally nefarious Gema Land Grabbers’ Association has said that “families holding title deeds in the Mau Forest should be compensated but after they have vacated the water tower.” This is where I differ with the demagoguery of this Mount Kenya fox.

First, it’s absurd that valid title deeds have been issued to people who illegally occupied the Mau Forest. It means a lands officer sent surveyors who demarcated part of the Mau Forest, mapped it, and gave the invaders official documents to show ownership of public land.

Second, if Kenya has to progress, it must be a country founded on laws. If Mr. Odinga, Gema and the Rift Valley MPs propose compensation for the illegal occupiers of the Mau Forest, they are replacing the rule of law with a process vilified by corruption. If our leaders can’t protect our constitutional laws and demand that the judiciary interpret and explain how the existing laws should protect us from the occupiers of the Mau, they should resign.

Our leaders are the wiliest craftsmen wriggling on mother earth. The debate on Mau Forest is about the calculus of strategy, alignment, and positioning for power in 2012. Mr. Odinga has lost favor with the Kamatusa and he sees no hope for their vote in the next elections. It is the reason he has been wooing the elusive Kikuyu vote.

You recall Mr. Odinga visited the chairman of the Mungiki sect of blood spillers in prison. This was the first step in wooing the Kikuyu vote. It is why Mr. Odinga did not demand the cleaning of these terrorists from our villages when the sect recently slaughtered hundreds of people in the Central Province.

A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Odinga took President Kibaki to Luo country to initiate development projects – in a province Kenya’s succeeding regimes have always neglected. As if Luo Nyanza has never known the perils of taxation without representation.

This was a double-edged dressing exercise. A public image to show the proponents of the International Criminal Court the two main suspects in the post-December 2007 election violence are friends after all. A public exercise to show Kenyans the PM is working with the president and will hopefully benefit from the Kikuyu vote in 2012. The Jatelo (leader) holds dearly that the “Kibaki Tosha” good turn must deserve another.

Yet the son of Oginga Odinga breathes with measured caution. In spite of tabling names of the 49 major grabbers of the Mau Forest, he doesn’t want to be on the warpath with the Rift Valley voters. Rift Valley folks and barons helped Mr. Odinga to create the gas chambers that gave birth to the current IDP situation – he owes them compensation on the government land the Kamatusa grabbers occupy.

Now most of the IDP’s are from the Gema. Any wonder Bishop Imathiu sees hope for the resettlement of the IDPs as part of the deal to compensate the thieves of the Mau Forest? Well, through the open wound of the Mau, it is obvious most politicians are demanding squatters the country over be resettled.

President Moi, the old professor of politics, perfected the art of corrupt land deals. His companies- real or fictitious- Kiptagich Tea Estates, Sian Enterprises, Kelewa Enterprises, and his most beloved son, Gideon Moi, curved immeasurable swathes of Mau Forest for themselves.

And the clique of the most powerful during the Moi administration recklessly mapped out their larger-than-size chunks from the Mau Forest for themselves. It includes current Baringo Central MP Sammy Mwaita. All the fictitious names given legitimacy of land ownership in the Mau are true opportunists from the Moi-Rift Valley Mafia. President Moi’s administration thrived in the art of absolute fiction – from Goldenberg International to Little Sisters of St. Francis in the Mau Forest.

Why did President Moi and his men have such impunity? Because the son of the Tugen knew there would be nothing subsequent regimes would do about corruption and land deals without incriminating themselves. Prosecuting a land grabber in the Moi regime would mean extending the same favor to the post-Independence land grabbers under President Kenyatta’s Gema. Note that the names of the Mau Forest list of shame belong to the Kamatusa tribes.

Now you see the reason Mr. Moi fervently supported Mr. Kibaki in the last elections. And before then, his predecessor’s son, Uhuru Kenyatta, the man Gema is grooming for 2012.

Mr. Odinga therefore is a wily, green snake in green grass. Tabling grabbed land measuring about 20,000 hectares while we know the true measure of stolen land in the Mau is approximately 400,000, is a travesty of truth. He is fighting tooth and nail to ensure part of the KES 38 billion ($500 million) set aside for the restoration of the Mau Forest goes into compensating the corrupt land dealers themselves.

If Mr. Odinga actually cared about displaced Kenyans, the IDPs should be his priority. One question I may ask: are the grabbers of the Mau Forest any more Kenyan than the IDPs? No. But Mr. Odinga is not sure the Kikuyu vote will be forthcoming in 2012 – most IDPs are Kikuyus.

Does Kenya still have use for Attorney General Amos Wako, Chief Justice Evans Gicheru? The body we call Parliament?

Mr. Odinga’s concern for the Mau Forest is like a small ward of burning paper, which will draw down to a whisp of flame, and then die out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower – a molten rose. Then all will be dark again.

If Premier Odinga ever ascended to Kenya’s top office, he would be as ineffective as Mr. Kibaki.

Related Posts

Tags: Kenya, politics