We are under no obligation to reward the Mau thugs!!!

By OKIYA OMTATAH OKOITI
Published January 5, 2009

As more than 10 million destitute Kenyans struggle to stay alive, fighting off starvation because of a recent severe drought caused largely by the massive destruction of forests across our country, it is unfathomable that anybody should be talking of any kind of payout to reward the very thugs responsible for the destruction of one of our main water towers, the Mau Forest.

That’s not to say that we should not, on purely humanitarian but very strong grounds, go out of our way to gracefully indemnify (not compensate!) those genuinely made destitute by the evictions. The small landowners who were conned into buying their parcels of land, or the squatters who were lured into the forest to provide a cover for the looters, should be given a soft landing. Nevertheless, any public money spent by the State on such a mission of mercy must ultimately be fully recovered from the super rich who hatched, implemented, and were the main beneficiaries of the Mau outrage.

Our Members of Parliament (MPs) are to blame for the two iniquitous Kenyan laws allowing the fat rats to demand compensation. Because successive post-independence parliaments failed to audit and modernize our laws, an iniquitous colonial law is still in our statutes to protect land grabbers. Under the guise of the sanctity of first title, but against public ethics, the powerful in government abuse their offices to irregularly allocate and register public land not available to privatization like gazetted forests, schools and other public utilities, and road reserves, then appeal to this outrageous law.

Then recently, because of their criminal mindsets and at huge public expense, MPs in the 10th Parliament cut shameful deals across the false ODM/PNU divide in shameful tradeoffs to save each others’ skins in the wake of mega scandals. They criminally conspired and passed a law that obliges the State to recover the Mau Forest land strictly in line with the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act, meaning grabbers must by law be compensated!

The Mau tragedy is a grand plunder of public resources, where individuals abused power to privatize their huge profits and socialize their devastating costs. Then President Moi led his henchmen on a looting spree. They cut down centuries old natural trees and sold them for billions of shillings. They used part of the money to build a tea factory, and make other expansive developments on the massive chunks of public land they had grabbed and privatised.

How much did it cost the public for the use of military personnel, trucks and other public resources to cut down and transport the huge logs to timber factories? What was the damage to our roads for transporting the inordinately heavy cargo? What are the social, political and economic costs to the country and region of the degraded Mau environment?

It’s a recipe for disaster to obey iniquitous laws. If we observe the laws and the Mau criminals laugh all the way to the bank, having made even more money selling our land and assets back to us, won’t their example be a total negation of the war on corruption?

It doesn’t follow that just because a rogue Parliament passed an iniquitous law then the Kenyan public is compelled to pay the crooks. That will set a dangerous precedent where criminals who steal from the public are rewarded instead of being severely punished. Parliament’s decision is NOT irrevocable! As a matter of national urgency, Premier Raila Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki should recall Parliament and have the MPs cure the anomaly by amending that law to remove the requirement to compensate those who own land in the Mau.

Ideally, those Mau titles should be nullified and used as evidence to prosecute those in whose names they were first issued.

Titles do not confer ownership; they only recognize it. Hence, under no circumstances can an immoral and illegal acquisition be made good by a mere piece of paper issued by whomever. Even the so-called sanctity of first title can no longer be used sanctify fraud. We live in a moral universe and modern Kenyan masses will not submit to the law of the jungle.

When the commands of justice and the demands of the law are in direct conflict, when the law is in conflict with natural justice, society has a moral obligation to disobey it and, by so doing, be held accountable to a superior duty. To obey bad or unconscionable laws is to commit crimes against justice. When legal requirement is opposed to a people’s ethical mandate it is worse than anarchy.

Anarchy may be bad, but despotism is worse (Locke). If we face an iniquitous law, then we must disobey, and risk anarchy, in order to resist the tendency toward the greater evil of despotism. If the Government obeys Parliament’s iniquitous law and rewards thieves that will put us on a slippery slope toward despotism, and it will bring us to the bottom in no time. Only disobeying such a law will have the beneficial and stabilizing effect of nudging our society closer to our shared vision of justice.

Related Posts