Before private entities began fencing off huge parcels of land in Wajir, for what they said were environmental conservation purposes, pastoralist communities would back in the day freely traverse the county in search of pasture for their livestock.
Among the beneficiaries of this unrestricted form of grazing was Abdi Billow, a 42-year-old father of seven, who, through consistent supply of pasture, was able to obtain enough produce from his livestock to take care of his family.
“Majority of land in Wajir is registered as community land, so what happens traditionally is that the elders decide when and where to graze, depending on rainfall patterns,” explained Mr Billow in an interview with DN2 Property.
This arrangement has ensured that the community benefits from the land without damaging it through unsustainable grazing practices, hence the irony in actions by conservancies to fence off land supposedly in an effort to preserve it.
“By replacing the traditional ‘unplanned’ grazing with ‘planned’ rotational grazing, the conservancies sought to enable the vegetation in the area to grow faster thus trap more carbon in the soil,” said Mr Billow.
However, Billow says that this model only worked in theory, with many pastoralists, including himself, encountering significant losses particularly during the dry season, when they could no longer migrate their cattle to greener pastures.
Mirroring the British colonial government mode of control that restricted the movement of people across established borders to prevent them from uniting, this form of land management alienated large tracts of land from indigenous communities in Wajir.
“This left us with limited access to grazing land and resources. It thus seemed to us that the conservancies were not fencing off the land for purposes of preserving the environment, rather to enrich certain individuals,” argued Billow, claiming that some of these conservancies continue to operate without approval from the county government, which is mandated with holding the land on behalf of the community in trust.
A carbon credit is a unit that can be purchased by companies with operations that inevitably result in the emission of greenhouse gases, to compensate for the damage that they cause to the environment.
Carbon credits are generated through projects that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including soil carbon removal, reforestation, and sustainable agriculture. One carbon credit is generated after one metric tonne of carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.
Since discussions around global warming began taking center-stage, many large-scale emitters, including the multinational companies, began contracting private entities to invest in projects that produce carbon credits on their behalf.
In parts of northern Kenya for instance, multinationals such as Meta and Netflix, have been working with the Northern Rangelands Trust, which comprises several conservancies, to generate carbon credits.
Under Kenyan law, these conservancies or their managing entities are required to ensure that part of the revenue generated from the sale of the carbon credits benefits the communities residing around them.
According to the community land act, projects done on community trust land can benefit the community either through royalty payouts, compensation or empowerment and capacity building programs.
While these conservancies may have initiated several such programs as required by law, an increasing number of people residing in the surrounding areas hold the view that the conservancies do not have their best interests at heart.
This growing apathy can partly be attributed to the lack of sufficient community engagement, with many locals not even aware that carbon credits are being generated from their land.
“The community land act directs that an agreement relating to investment in community land should be free, open and a result of a consultative process involving stakeholder consultations and involvement of the community,” said Billow.
Conversely, provision of information about the project agenda and distribution of benefits has been limited to very few people, with high mobility, low literacy rates and limited access to media making it even more difficult to get the message across.
“These conservancies are becoming a frequent source of conflict, the biggest casualties being the disadvantaged groups like women, youth and the minority ethnic groups,” stated Billow.
Over the past decade, as the global demand for food, energy and natural resources has increased, so too has the competition for land in remote parts of Kenya, where international organisations have been leveraging their resources to acquire huge tracts of land.
Under the guise of conservation and community empowerment initiatives, the belief is that these entities are pushing out locals from land on which their lives and livelihoods depend, leaving them languishing in abject poverty.
More than 800 kilometres from Wajir, in Taita Taveta County, Jacob Mwangala, a small-scale miner, bears the scars of a battle over ownership of land that generations in his family have called home.
This form of land management has alienated large tracts of land from indigenous communities.
Photo credit: Bonface Bogita | Nation Media Group
Mwangala recalls that on October 12, 2020, as he was going about his business in Mwatate town, he received a call from his wife informing him that strange men had arrived at their home in Kamtonga.
“She sounded shaken, so I had to leave everything that I was doing and rush back home. Upon arrival, I found the men conducting a survey on the property that we shared with other relatives,” said Mwangala in an interview with DN2 Property.
When he asked them why they were trespassing on the property, the individuals showed him some documents, purporting to have received the right to prospect for minerals in the area from the administrative centre in Nairobi and the area district headquarters at Wundanyi.
After a lot of back and forth at the county offices, Jacob decided to take the matter to court, which in 2021 ruled that the land legally belonged to him and his family, perhaps due to pressure from human rights organisations.
Despite this ruling, the trader continued to receive constant harassment and threats from the individuals who were keen on accessing the minerals buried in his land.
“One night, while we were asleep, we heard screams coming from within the compound. We woke up to find part of our land on fire, with bulldozers bringing down the houses that were on our property,” said Mwangala.
He and his relatives attempted to stop the destruction, but they were overpowered by hired goons who left them with the scars to remember the events of that unfortunate evening.
Like the residents of Wajir, communities living in Taita-Taveta county have, for a long time, been the unfortunate subjects of a seemingly futile fight against alienation from their land and land resources.
Even though the population of the indigenous community is so small, many of the members live as squatters or own very small parcels in an area that is so vast, hence a majority of them continue to languish in abject poverty.
Without the participation of the local communities, who are the custodians of the land where the minerals are found, international companies have proceeded to map out and fence off huge parcels of land in the area.
These actions have resulted in serious clashes between the locals and the international miners, who often take advantage of the lack of titles and poor demarcation of boundaries to claim legal ownership of the land.
“Violent evictions in Taita have become commonplace, with large-scale prospectors and miners privatising nearly all the land that is rich in minerals,” says Gilbert Charo, a land rights activist.
Failure by the authorities to implement laws that prevent the oppression and alienation of local communities from the resources on their land has further compounded this issue, with many of them being used for the wrong reasons.
“Instead of fulfilling their constitutional duty of safeguarding the rights of innocent civilians, we have in many cases seen the authorities being used by powerful entities to arrest, torture and even murder those who resist being evicted,” posits Charo.
According to Charo, urgent interventions are needed to control the operations of these international entities, since they not only pose a threat to the community, but to the environment at large as well.
“Once the miners exhaust the minerals, we have had many instances where they have left the land open, with seemingly no plans to seal it and to rehabilitate it,” noted Charo.
Plant life over large surface areas of land has been destroyed, leaving residents and the surrounding wildlife with no source of sustenance. Proceeds of these mining activities often go to the foreign entities, yet the negative consequences remain with the local communities.
The same scenario has been witnessed in other coastal towns such as Kwale and Kilifi, where land has become the subject of intense competition between the local communities and foreign entities.
This competition has historical roots dating back to the pre-colonial period, when locals were deprived of land they owned. Consequently, a substantial percentage of the coastal community remains without title documents to the land they have occupied for ages.
Over the years, the county governments have further complicated this issue, by their constant leasing of community land to investors who do not have the best interests of the locals at hand.
“These governments do not compensate the evictees, or offer them an alternative place to settle,” says Hassan Bakari, a land rights activist and resident of Kwale.
Bakari holds that the government should put in place measures to protect local communities from evictions and further harassment by entities claiming ownership of their land.
“It should be recognised that all land in the country, wherever it is situated, has local claimants who were born there and thus have a right to claim it as theirs irrespective of whether it is demarcated or titled,” says Bakari.
Sensitising local community members about their rights in relation to land tenure and land resources is also crucial in the fight against their exclusion and exploitation.
“Many of the community members are unable to actively participate in public forums and negotiate better terms in relation to usage of their land because they are not aware of the provisions of the community land act,” explained Bakari.
Meanwhile, Nagib Shamsan, the chairman of Ilishe Trust and a member of the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA), says that relevant authorities tasked with safeguarding the rights of Kenyans, particularly those who are disadvantaged in one way or another, should express more goodwill in fulfilling their mandate.
Nagib Shamsan, member of Kenya Land Alliance.
Photo credit: Kevin Odit | Nation Media Group
“For example, I have filed a petition to the National Senate which was approved on historical land injustices and the constant evictions in Mombasa. The petition was approved and the speaker gave directions, unfortunately, the Senate land committee has failed to take up the matter,” stated Shamsan.
The activist is also calling for action to be taken against lands officials in the counties, who seem to have forgotten the oaths they took of safeguarding land ownership, protecting property rights and ensuring accurate land transactions.
“We have had cases of registrars of land in Mombasa, issuing title deeds of trust land, something that can only be done by land administrators in Nairobi. We cannot have people being treated as squatters on land they were born in,” said Shamsan.
Last year, residents of Mombasa were embroiled in a fierce battle with landlords descended from Omani Arab families claiming ownership of land in the county, which they controlled before Kenya attained its independence.
“It is very unfortunate that more than 60 years since the country attained its independence, foreigners are still being allowed to deprive people who have lived here for generations of their land and property,” said Shamsan.
