Mau Narok land saga goes to court again

By Evelyn Kwamboka

Members of the Indigenous Maasai community are back in court to stop the government from subdividing land in Narok to IDPs.

They want Attorney General Amos Wako and the Registered Settlement Funds Trustees restrained from issuing allotment letters or title deeds.

Justice Daniel Musinga on Monday certified the case as urgent and ordered the members’ advocate, Mr Thomas Letangule to serve the AG, RSFT, the administrators of the estate of Mbiyu Koinange and former Cabinet minister Simeon Nyachae who are respondents in the case.

The judge ordered that the case be heard interpartes on Wednesday.

The case is on grounds that if the orders are not granted, there is a likelihood of breach of peace and security or emergence of clashes in Mau Narok.

In his affidavit, Prof Meitamei Olol Dapash said the government and other respondents have moved with haste to dispose three land parcels in an attempt to frustrate the case.

He said two people, Mr Moses Ole Mpoe and Parsaaiya Ole Kitu, were murdered and some people including Koinange’s son- David Njuno- have been charged with the killings.

Dapash said the local youth have vowed to block the resettlement of IDPs despite the government’s commitment to give them land.

In the case filed last year, a section of Maasai moved to court to petition the government to repossess thousands of acres of ancestral land that was grabbed by the colonial government and later allocated to former powerful government individuals after independence.

They claimed the British colonial government forcefully evicted them from their ancestral land and allocated the land to European settlers for farming, but after attainment of independence the government fraudulently and discriminatorily allocated the land to some powerful government individuals.

It is their case that the resettlement carried out by the government after independence, failed to resettle the Maasai community back to their ancestral land, and instead allocated the vast arable land to Koinange and Nyachae, who by then served in the government.