Kenya: Land conflicts cause ethnic bloodshed
Since ´91, ethnic violence has erupted with a ferocity and mind numbing regularity, not seen before in Kenya’s 30 years of relatively peaceful independence. The core of the conflict is the issue of land.
By Ian Gatere01. October 1998
It was with a feeling of déjà vu that Kenyans woke up one May morning to the news, that raiders had stormed a police station in Chagamwe on the coast and made off with over 30 suspects, who were remanded for carrying out ethnic violence.
From the coast to the Northern Rift, Kenya has since 1991 been wrecked by ethnic violence that has seen over 5000 people die, property worth millions destroyed and thousands of its citizens displaced. The Chagamwe raid came in the same month as the Pokot raids on the Marakwet in the western part of the country displaced 10.000 people and forced the President to send in the military. Which in turn came just two or so months after ethnic violence in the Rift Valley. On that occasion, over a 100 people were left dead and the shock was so great to visiting American Reverend Jesse Jackson that he prodded a surprisingly lethargic government into action.
Land and Ethnicity has always been an emotive issue in Kenya, be it over crops, grazing rights or sheer cattle rustling. But even so, the 1990´s has seen ethnic violence erupting with a ferocity and a mind numbing regularity not seen before in Kenya’s 30 years of relatively peaceful independence history. Since 1991, the violence has caused close to twice as many deaths as the "trouble" in Northern Ireland has done in three.
Ethnic tensions linked to land problem
The current parliament which is hung between KANU, the ruling party, and several opposition parties of various size, recently passed a motion to set up a South African style "Truth and Reconciliation Committee" to investigate the root causes of the ethnic violence.
It was discovered that to some, it is the outpouring of old ethnic tensions that have been simmering underneath the surface and kept in check only by a strong central government.
To others it is the resurfacing of factors that have remained unattended since independence. A lot of people were left landless, either because their communal land was acquiesced by former colonialists, forcing the new independent government to respect the creation of "private property" boundaries, or because "alien" ethnic communities, for modern business purposes, started settling in land ancestrally held by other ethnic communities. Also, in many cases government authorities has practised plain illegal allocation and misuse.
While acceding to hold multi party elections in 1991, the year the violence begun in earnest, Kenya’s President Moi gave his own spin to the issue. Multi partyism, he predicted, would fan tribalism, even conflict.
Speeches one day, violence the next
As if on cue, the political parties that rose to five Moi´s ruling KANU party challenge, begun to split up. More on personality and ethnic differences than on political ideology or principle. At first glance making the Presidents "prediction" to have had a rather uncanny accuracy. Yet the fact that these tensions, real or imagined, waited until the introduction of competitive politics to erupt into violence pointed to a trigger factor.
Two reports on the ethnic violence - one by a parliamentary probe committee and another by the National Council of Churches - recognised that the salient issues of land, ethnicity and economics had not been adequately addressed by successive Kenyan governments. Also, the reports pointed to the cause and effect pattern of incitement by politicians and the eruption of ethnic violence. Speeches at public rallies one day, ethnic violence thereafter - politicians insecure in their political turf playing the ethnic card to shore up support and to consolidate their personal and party grip on political power and the benefits accrued.
In one shocking recent example, an assistant Minister in the Office of the President vowed there would be "endless bloodshed" if a "stupid magistrate" ruled in favour of an opposition petition challenging the election of the head of State. Less that a week after this statement and after the opposition politician took his petition to court, violence broke out, targeting members of the opposition leaders ethnic group. After spirited lobbying by the opposition and the Churches, the government acted decisively to stop it. But not before over 100 lives had been lost and thousands of people left homeless.
No solution in sight
As Kenyans continue to await the setting up of a parliamentary committee, a debate on various structural changes that can be made to prevent ethnic violence and corruption of authority has picked up in earnest. Fuelled in no small way by public protests that from mid last year focused national attention in the need to review the constitution. To make it equitable and effective to all citizens regardless of background, ethnic or otherwise. This year, the government acceded to the setting up of a committee drawn from different segments of society to review the constitution.
But as the lobbying for fundamental changes continues, today’s landless Kenyan is perhaps as troubled as his forefathers were for having no place that he can call his own to live, raise his family and be buried when he dies.
