Compulsory purchase and land acquisition in Kenya
Nabutola, Wafula
Right now as I write, Kenya is experiencing severe drought. Some areas have not had rain for years. Livestock, particularly amongst the pastoralist communities have died and continue to die. Just the other day government decided to buy the livestock so threatened, in order to secure whatever latent value could be salvaged before the animals died from thirst and/or starvation. No pasture. Some of the livestock died in transit, while most died upon arrival at the Kenya Meat Commission Ranch in Athi River. Kenyans (in Turkana, West Pokot, Baringo, Kitui, Samburu, Mwingi, parts of Nyeri Districts) have been reported to eat wild berries. I saw on TV mothers boil the berries; they reckon it takes twelve hours to eliminate harmful aspects. More than ten million Kenyans are at risk. One of the possible explanations is that we have not managed our environment as well as we should have; we have harvested trees everywhere, especially in forests, far beyond what could be considered good forest husbandry. The trees are used for construction, wood fuel and charcoal-burning. As a nation, we adopted a forests management policy commonly referred to as the Shamba system, whereby citizens are allowed to cultivate crops in the forests and in return they are expected to take care of the trees. This system is a failure. There are loopholes for possible collusion to burn charcoal and or fell the trees for other uses. The demand for timber and charcoal in urban areas is insatiable, thus prices are high ad tempting. The challenge is that there is no systematic way of replenishing these forests.
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