The destruction of the Mara was bound to happen after it was turned into a playground as political and commercial interests converged inside the Maasai Mau Forest.
The original goal was the control of then Narok County Council which held the Maasai Mau Forest as trust land for the community.
It was the arrival of members of the Kalenjin community as new settlers in the Maasai Mau that appears to have changed the matrix in the 1980s.
Starting from 1998, the Nation was told, there was collusion between officials from the Ministry of Lands (most of who were from the Kalenjin community) and politicians such as Mr Anthony Kimetto, who served as MP for Chepalungu.
“He used to go to Narok each week to supervise printing of title deeds on an industrial scale. But unknown to Mr Kimetto and the people who bought the land, the Narok County Council and the Lands ministry had not gazetted the relevant areas as adjudication areas,” Mr Parselelo Kantai, a journalist who watched and documented the destruction as it started, said.
Mr Kantai says the defunct Narok County Council did not pass a resolution declaring parts of Maasai Mau an adjudication area — a loophole that is now being used to evict the settlers.
“Until an area is declared an adjudication zone, any title cannot be legally recognised,” Mr Kantai said, a position supported by Narok County Commissioner George Natembeya.
“The titles are mere pieces of paper,” Mr Natembeya said.
“If the titles held by the people there are legal, can the owners go to the banks to seek loans?” he asked.
To understand where we are today, Mr Kantai said, one must know the legal status of Maasai Mau forest and look at the very politics of Narok County since the 1970s when the late William ole Ntimama was the chairman of the Narok County Council.
Records show that Maasai Mau is not a government forest; it used to be trust land and ideally, it is still under the Narok County Government.
“The fundamental problem is that every attempt to demarcate the forest was never concluded.”
Mr Kantai says the first attempt was made in 1999 after Chief Lerionka ole Ntutu (now deceased) was commissioned by former President Daniel Moi to do so. This was not concluded, neither was a similar attempt 10 years later.
"As a result, what the government is doing today (evicting those who have invaded the forest) is based on legal quicksand and can be easily challenged in a court of law, especially when one looks at how the issues have unfolded over the last four decades. The encroachment of the Maasai Mau was a deliberate political move that was executed commercially.”
According to Mr Kantai, the Ogiek people owned the five group ranches located at the southern end of the forest.
As an ethnic minority in Narok who traditionally engaged in less ‘offensive’ forest uses such as bee keeping and hunting of small mammals, the Ogiek have always been painted as a community that lives-and-lets-forests-live.
But some prominent members of the community adopted the land selling and timber selling culture that gripped Kenya, especially during Mr Moi’s time.
The Kipsigis saw an opportunity. All along, the community had had a long-running border dispute with the Maasai that goes back to the late 1920s.
They therefore strategised and became members of the five Ogiek’s group ranches.
“Soon, the ranches started expanding very fast and having an avalanche of members.” Kantai added that one group ranch, Reyia, had an initial area of 36 hectares but was expanded to 3,600 hectares between 1988 and 2003.
The group ranch officials behind this relied on Kalenjin politicians for support and sought the services of surveyors who helped them to encroach into the forest as they “stuffed new members from Kericho, Bomet and other areas.”
But the entry of non-Maasai members into the Maasai Mau and outlying areas created a new environmental challenge that has resulted in the situation the Mara River is in today.
For one, the Ogiek went on, to a certain extent, to change their lifestyle. The forest cover was dwindling and with it the resources they had earlier relied upon for survival (wild animals and honey).
Some started engaging in cultivation and as Mr Kantai found out, there were five-acre pieces of cultivated land inside the forest.
At the same time, the Maasai people’s mode of resource use (pastoralism) that is credited with preservation of the forest was now not the dominant resource-use model there.
The Kipsigis were more interested in farming and were determined at that. After all, they had not broken any law.
“These are people who used their life-savings to buy the farms and were doing well,” Mr Kantai said, adding that some of the people who invested there were ex-soldiers involved in UN peacekeeping missions in Sierra Leone.
It was also apparent from the field excursions the Nation undertook that blame cannot entirely be levelled against any one ethnic group.
“Majority of the Kalenjin people support conservation,” Mr Natembeya said. He warned against generalising, saying the blame should be laid on politicians, and especially those who incite one group against the other.
Indeed, prominent members of the Maasai community are not entirely blameless. “The late William ole Ntimama pushed the Narok County Council to sell its land in Olenguruoni side of the forest to himself and to Moi,” Mr Kantai claimed, adding that this is how Mr Moi acquired the Kiptagich Tea Farm.
Interestingly, Mr Ntimama’s claim that selling the land to himself and Mr Moi would contribute to the protection of the forest appears to have worked to some extent because the former President’s tea farm created some kind of a barrier that has prevented the invasion of the forest in the relevant section.
Other elite from the Maasai community including members of the Ole Ntutu family are said to have made a killing by selling off part of the land to residents of Bomet, Kericho and Nakuru. “There are very few elites who were not involved,” Mr Kantai revealed.
Official records show that Maasai Mau Forest is still trust land — the reason why the government seems determined to kick out the invaders, most of whom are Kalenjins.
Mr Natembeya told the Nation that already the government has evicted some 8,000 people during phase one and is set to evict between 18,000 and 20,000 people in phase two.
Mr Natembeya seemed alive to the fact that the entire issue has many layers of complications.
He said that the scam surrounding the Mau invasion involved “big people who colluded with group ranch officials, surveyors and lands officers”, adding that the “convergence of interests has now made it a very hot issue although it is supposed to be a straight forward matter”.
But the matter is hardly a straight forward one. According to Mr Kantai, one cannot comprehensively understand why the Mara River has lost water without taking into consideration the many sensitive dimensions that have culminated in what has become of the Maasai Mau forest today.
Considered part of the Mau Forest Complex, Maasai Mau is a very important forest from where nine of the rivers that feed Lake Victoria with water rise.
“This is 46,000 hectares of sensitive indigenous forest,” Mr Kantai said.
From its upper catchment area emanates the Ewaso Ngiro River that flows to Lake Natron in Tanzania, which is the main flamingo breeding ground.
On its part, the Mara River comes from the western part of the forest.
The political goal, it is now clear, was to control Narok County politically.
This has somewhat succeeded because any gubernatorial candidate in Narok is unlikely to win without securing support from members of the Kipsigis community — which also creates tension.
Any eviction is always seen by members of the Kalenjin community as a political attack on them.
The last time a major eviction was undertaken in the Mau Complex was in 2005.
This was three years after Kanu government lost power. Before then, the Kalenjin — who were believed to have dominated the Kenya Defence Forces, parastatals and other governmental institutions — were angered by the fact that the Narc government started laying them off and replacing them with members of other communities.
The Kalenjin felt aggrieved and their leaders started inciting them against leaving the forest. Forest can recover but what about Narok?
The government says that kicking the people out of the forest is a major move aimed at enabling it to recover by itself which will, in turn, return water to the Mara.
This view is shared by ecologists who also say that recovery of the forest will nevertheless take longer where all the trees have been cut down.
But the recovery of the Maasai Mau Forest and survival of the Mara River partly depends on whether the Narok County Government is willing to go the extra mile to manage the Mara ecosystem in a more efficient manner.
Currently, the county government is accused of doing a shoddy job if a report compiled by dons from the Maasai Mara University and their overseas counterparts is anything to go by.
Dubbed ‘Building a Sustainable Management System for Maasai Mara National Reserve’, the 76-page report paints a gloomy picture of how the county is managing this globally-important resource.
The county’s Environment executive refused to talk with us even after promising to do so.
The Nation wanted the county government to address claims that county government has neither come up with its own management plan for the Maasai Mara nor does it seem keen to implement the one formulated through a process funded by the Wild Wide Fund (WWF) NGO that covered the 2012-2022 period.
This plan not only provides for an ecological management plan but calls for zoning off critically important areas of the Mara into high and low use areas and the Mara River corridor.
The dons say that licensing of new lodges and airstrips in the Mara ecosystem is inconsistent with recommendations of the environmental impact assessments conducted to protect the ecological balance of the reserve, and that unregulated growth in and very near the reserve is beginning to affect the ecosystem by interfering with animal habitats, creating environmental pollution and destroying the watershed that feeds the Maasai Mara and Serengeti.
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