Over 25 per cent of Mau grabbed, report says

By David Ochami

The taskforce that investigated human settlement on the expansive Mau Forest Complex says 107,000 hectares were illegally acquired.

This represents 25 per cent of the key forest, and the excision took place in 15 years of violation of Kenyan laws and international conventions.

Their report says the "encroachment" is mainly in the complex’s southern and northern blocks.

Destroying important forest habitat, which the taskforce says supports water and wildlife (including endangered animal and plant species), violated the East Africa Community Treaty (on shared resources).

The Mau Complex waters the trans-boundary Mara River and Lake Natron.

The water tower, described as Kenya’s largest water system, also feeds rivers that drain into Lake Victoria, according to the report.

The destruction also violated the African Convention on Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the Convention on Biological, Convention on Migratory Species and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Dwindling cover

Kenya’s forest cover is just 1.3 per cent of its total vegetation and disappearing through wide spread violation of the Government Land Act, Forest Act, Physical Planning Act, Agricultural Control Act, Survey Act and Environment Management and Co-ordination Act.

Most excisions of forest land in the Mau took place between the mid 1990s and 2001.

In 2001, it happened purportedly to settle the Ogiek community and landless victims of land clashes in the 1990s.

The most irregular excisions were done during the establishment of the 28,500 hectare Nessuit and Kaptagich settlement schemes, from which 18,516 title deeds were issued.

Other significant excision happened on the northern side, including the Ol Posimuro Forest Reserve leading to Illmotiok, Nkoben and Ololulunga settlements.

The report describes two types of encroachment; one in which some allotees "have documents supporting their ownership" of land parcels and another in which settlers have no papers to back ownership.

In the latter category, the taskforce says 99 per cent of land titles were acquired fraudulently.

All settlements on the southern are termed illegal, except on Metkei Forest zone.

The report says the Provincial Administration and other officials decreed the illegal settlements "without authority to allocate land, violating the findings of a 1986 presidential commission and other laws".

Water catchment

For the southern and northern encroachments of 2001, no environmental impact assessment was done before the excisions, which eventually led to multiple allocations. Some public institutions got more land than they needed, while some settlers got title deeds before degazettement of the forest land.

The report says the Physical Planning Act, which protects gazetted forests, was violated when the allocations were made.

Both settlements proceeded unilaterally against court orders and violated ecologically fragile areas and water catchment regions.

Eventually, the Ogiek and other beneficiaries were marginalised, according to the report.

Unintended beneficiaries

It also alleges human settlement on the northern flank included beneficiaries who are not members of the preceding group ranches, originally.

Some settlements schemes "ballooned" beyond boundaries of designated areas into water catchment areas and gazetted forests.

At Ol Pusimoru Forest Reserve, the taskforce says land adjudication should have applied only to trust land.

The origin of the anomaly was the 1957 gazettement of the forest when the Maasai and Ogiek lived in it.

The Maasai apparently accepted the gazettement hoping to benefit from commercial logging, but did not move out of the forest, whose boundaries were also not marked, between 1967 and 2007.

This settlement ignored the recommendation of the 1986 Ole Ntutu Presidential Commission.