By Jenny Luesby

In Gilgil last week, parents played out a piece of violence that speaks to the suffering generated across our country and in every domain by poor systems, poor governance…and by poor civil protest too.

At stake was 30 acres of land, which the parents say, belongs to their primary school, St Patrick’s. Since 1998, a local trader has used it to build rental houses, and no amount of ‘due process’ or engagement with Nakuru County has been able to get these ‘illegal’ buildings removed.

There are not many primary schools that can cite as urgent or life-changing the loss or gain of 30 acres: primary schools don’t generally need vast tracts of land to deliver classroom teaching and a sports field.

But for these parents, once their children complete primary school, the cost of the lost land is biting them hard — for without the land, the school has been unable to build a secondary school, leaving children to walk ‘tens of kilometers’ to the nearest secondary.

No one can claim that this is of no consequence in the educational outcomes for these children — an entire community’s future is being impaired with those daily hours of childhood commuting.

But the shock factor last week was in the parents’ methods for solving the problem.

They did claim to have tried every way to get the former council to address the problem. They even claimed that former officials were involved in the misappropriation of the land.

Maybe they were. Maybe they were not. But what is true is that the country is awash with fake title deeds. From Lands Ministry raids to title deed committees, the existence of parallel deeds has been proven to be a widespread curse for the nation.

Clearing up this mess of genuine versus false deeds, and the issue of recompense for those who paid, unwittingly, for fake deeds, is a forensic chase that any leadership would be daunted by.

But is there a way around it? It simply has to be done: case after case, a system put in place capable of processing what appears to be as many as millions of cases.

In this, there must surely be ways of prioritising cases, so that where entire communities are losing schooling, or health facilities, water, or other basics, such cases move automatically to the head of the queue.

Until then, and with Nakuru having taken, so far, 15 years to address this issue, the parents took matters into their own hands.

At which point, anger and frustration converted it in a straight line into brutality. For the victims — as the parents wielded weapons and moved together to destroy 10 homes and sets of personal belongings ­— were the tenants of the homes on the contested land.

For anyone caught in a dispute between landlord and landowner, theirs is truly a case of ‘wrong place, wrong time’. They have most certainly ended up in the washback from other peoples’ fight. For those tenants didn’t steal the land. Yet their children wept as their homes were demolished. These were the ‘innocents’ in the story, served no notice and given no chance, before their entire homes were wiped out.

It’s a phenomenon that some would label ‘misdirected anger’.

Moment of reflection

Indeed, ironically, these parents didn’t even lay a finger on the trader’s own home — the one who had built the properties (although we of the masses don’t know whether he is also a loser: as in, whether he claims to have paid for the land).

No. Their way to fight a title deed wrong was to smash up the lives of the families in the houses they claimed had been illegally built.

And there lies the misery, too, of civil protest without compassion. For how hard would it have been to let those people move out, to help them move out, to help them with other rental properties?

Does it feel good to destroy everything another family owns so that your own child doesn’t have so far to walk to school?

Is that Kenyan values?

Surely, it leaves one wondering.

Definitely, their frustration is real and their case needy of attention. It behoves the new Governor of Nakuru County to devote resources to a solution that is just and fair to all, and that gives this community the school for 1,000 children that it seeks.

But let us be a nation where we remember, too, the tenants in this equation. It wasn’t their fault. And they didn’t deserve their own lives set back, possibly decades. They have children too, and their children deserve a break too, and protection from violence.

As it is, if we are now to set our entire system to rights, across decades and generations of multiple injustices, it is worth a moment of reflection on how to do it without destroying our fellow travellers.

Compassion counts in this — present day compassion, as we set right historical injustice.

There just are ways of doing these things that are smart, versus brutal.

Those parents could have rehoused those tenants and then demolished the houses. At which point, I would have counted them as role models. This way please let them never be. 

The writer is Group Consulting Editor at The Standard Group.

jluesby@standardmedia.co.ke