Community stakes claim to part of Mt Kenya Forest

By WAINAINA NDUNG’U

A community is seeking the excision of part of Mt Kenya East Forest, which it claims it was dispossessed of 80 years ago.

In a petition to the Kenya Forestry Service (KFS), the 2,000-member community in Chuka, Tharaka Nithi County, is seeking to get back a section of forest known as “Magundu Ma Chuka.”

The claimants say they are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the forest before it was excised in 1934 and classified as part of Mt Kenya Forest Reserve.

The claimants say they are not asking for settlement in a Government forest, but only the restoration of their historical land, which has rendered them squatters and confined them to poverty and struggle.

“This is not a case wherein social squatters are asking to be settled in the forest as it is indeed acknowledged that settling squatters there does not solve the problem of landlessness,” they say in the petition sent to the Kenya Forest Service last month.

The document had been prepared by 2,000 members of the Chuka community under the registered trustees of Atiriri Bururi ma Chuka Trust and witnessed by the Meru South District Supreme Council of Njuri Ncheke elders. It is further to an earlier letter to KFS last year.

A preamble says the document was authored following five meetings held at Kirobia-Chuka’s chief’s camp open grounds between November 6, last year and February 21.

“The claim for Magundu Ma Chuka is as old as 1934. Indeed this claim is evidence of an historical injustice, which ought to have been put to rest long time ago,” says the community. The community says it relied on forest resources for food, housing and work and that it fully ceased utilising the forest when the State suspended shamba system in the commercial forest plantations in 1990.

Describing themselves as “amongst the most disadvantaged people in Kenya today,” the community blames the laxity on part of past leadership and a desire not to open old wounds for having failed to get redress.

“They have little formal education and their vulnerable legacies have left them with little power or experience when negotiating for the future of their communities and their forests. Indeed, they are now landless and this has compounded poverty,” says the advocacy group that helped draw up the petition.

The claimants say letting the community control the forest is key to conservation of this part of Mt Kenya Forest and that there is “potential to conserve this part of Mt Kenya Forest that cannot be sustained if exploitation by the society is maintained”.