The exiting of the colonialist from Kenya, whether from the white highlands or from the rich arable tracts of land scattered all over the country opened the floodgates for land ownership. Some ambitious businessmen-cum-land buying cooperative magnates staked out pieces of land, collected hard-earned monies from their peasantry tribesmen and settled them there. Through the years, some of these parcels of land changed hands in willing-buyer-willing-seller contracts between peoples of varying ethnic backgrounds and thus begun a lifetime of aliens-in-own-motherland status.
There are pieces of land that the government appropriated for public use such as the ADC farms or for research institutes like KARI, KEFRI, KEMRI, Potato Research, forest reserves and these were spread all over the republic on what we may collectively refer to as ‘ancestral‘ lands. Some of these were later misappropriated to powerful individuals in government or to their cronies, family and sympathisers. These we need to know and the beneficiaries either forced to remit their true market values to the government or the land is repossessed by the government. If there is no use the government could put this land to, then the locals should be consulted (in genuinely fair fora) to find out their wishes- maybe genuine, bona-fide landless peoples in these parts could be settled on these lands. We still have IDPs scattered all over the country since the invasion of Kenya by the white man!
Lands that have changed hands in what is legally termed as willing buyer willing seller arrangements and these, ethnic backgrounds of the participants notwithstanding, ought to be treated as such- business transactions which are sacrosanct and protected by the laws of the land- if the original owner(s) did not benefit from a mis-appropriation, or land-grabbing scheme.
The Kenya we want today has no room for a blanket branding of regions as ‘ancestral’. We all know that our ancestors did not ‘own’ land, they just occupied what they deemed useful to them without regard to borders or boundaries. Statements by the likes of Gideon Moi, Daniel Moi, Ruto and others who have re-demarcated Kenya into tribal enclaves and sponsored ethnic cleansing are nothing less than criminal. There was no distinct line separating the Masai-land from Gikuyu-land or was there? I stand to be corrected.
