By Kipkirui K’telwa

What exactly did Forest and Wildlife Minister Noah Wekesa mean when he said the Mau evictees should go back to where they came from? Is he implying that the State is planning mass deportation of the people of Mau as the colonialist did to most communities during their rule?

Unless the Government has other secrets, I would want to believe that it is promoting balkanisation of the country. Otherwise, why would he ask people who have sired children and buried their kinsmen in the Nakuru and Molo parts of Mau forest to go back to their homes in Kericho, Bureti, Bomet and elsewhere?

Most of the people who have volunteered to vacate their homes still live by the roadside.

Relief agencies took long to provide much needed humanitarian support to the displaced persons. Whether these people return to their homes at night and go back to the roadsides in the morning cannot surprise anyone. It is normal practise for a dispossessed person to sneak back to their former home as a way of beating disorientation.

The people being accused of sneaking back to their homes at night are women and children, whom we cannot expect to live in the open air at night.

While at it, both the State and relief agencies owe the evictees an apology. If the Government is housing and feeding slum dwellers, then the same should be extended to Mau evictees. Otherwise, it would be applying double standards to ask people to move out of their homes but fail to compensate, feed and shelter them once they are out.

By the way, not everybody who lives in Mau is a farmer. There are traders and other professionals whose livelihoods would be interfered with once evictions are actualised. The State should compensate them, too.

Natures’ Wisdom, a community-based organisations based in South Rift, estimates that more than one million people eke out a living from the Mau. It reports also that excisions of land for tea farming by British settlers displaced thousands of people from their original land and pushed them into the Mau forest for alternative settlement. Successive governments have invoked eviction orders on the forest dwellers. Records indicate that evictions started immediately after gazettement of the Mau in 1932. The same exercise continued intermittently up to August, 1992.

The 1974 eviction disregarded sanctity of life, human dignity and protection of family. Security personnel, including GSU, confiscated and sold their livestock at between Sh10 and Sh20.

These brutalities did not deter the people from returning to the forest because they were not given alternative settlement. Therefore, the State should compensate the evictees.

It is the work of the Government to indiscriminately feed, shelter and protect its citizens.