Research Paper

(MS Word Format)

1 Introduction 2

1.1 Conflicts within Modern Systems of Ownership 3

1.2 Conflicts involving both Traditional & Modern Systems of Ownership 3

1.3 Conflicts Arising Out of Political Failure 4

2 Land In Kenya 4

2.1 A Brief Historical Overview: The Gikuyu Question 4

2.2 Dealing with Landlessness: Grappling with the Gikuyu Question? 6

2.3 The Pastoralist Question 8

2.4 The Unanswered Question of Land Reform in Kenya 9

3 Competition Between Elites 12

3.1 Historical Background to Kenya's Elites 12

4 Land and Elites: What Conflict? 18

4.1 What Conflict? 18

4.2 Land, Democratisation, Pluralism and Ethnicity: The Dynamics of Land-Related Conflict 21

5 Conflict Resolution 23

5.1 The Presidency 24

5.2 Parliament 24

5.3 The Judiciary, Provincial Administration and Security Services 25

5.4 The Church 26

5.4.1 The Catholic Church in the Rift Valley 26

5.4.2 The Catholic Church in Western Province 26

5.4.3 The NCCK (the example of Eldoret) 27

6 Ethnic Living Space and the Crisis of the African State 27

7 The New Mitumba Generation 30

7.1 Overview 31

7.2 The New Mitumba Generation 34

7.3 The Fruits of Multi-Party 35

0. Introduction

Kenya's particular colonial experience has meant that land often forms the backdrop to a variety of conflict. A predominately agricultural country where only 20% of the land is of high agricultural potential; combined with the consolidation, adjudication and registration of land that started in the colonial period; one of the world's fastest growing populations; defined territorial concepts of 'ethnic living space' within the country - all these and many other issues have combined to make land Kenya's hottest political potato. Kenyan history also means that decades-old tensions with regard to land and ethnic living space have had a significant impact on efforts at democratisation since the early 1990s. The only other nations on the continent where land is as central an issue are Zimbabwe and South Africa - both which had large white settler populations. The other issue that makes Kenya special is the fact that fairly dramatic efforts since independence until around 1970, were made to correct the situation regarding land that was alienated to the settlers. In the process of making this correction, by entrenching the concept of individual title as the supreme form of land tenure, elites were created in Kenyan society that have rendered Kenya's political, economic and social development unique on the continent.

When one considers some of the empirical data available regarding land related conflicts in Kenya via the national press, it quickly becomes clear that the conflicts fall into the following broad categories which are often inter-related in a host ways:

0. Conflicts within Modern Systems of Ownership

Conflict between individual people, families or organisations over land rights and ownership - tenure issues that have an economic premise. In these kinds of land-related conflict the national legal system is accepted by the protagonists as having jurisdiction. Here it is recognised that indigenous tenure systems also have elaborate conflict resolution mechanisms... Currently land issues are still causing a lot of dispute in Kenya and over 50% of the cases at the Registry of the Courts are on land issues. "This may have been the reason for the Government's initiative to have land cases removed from the jurisdiction of the courts, and have them handled by elders... The legal basis for dispute resolution by elders was the Magistrates Jurisdiction Amendment Act of 1981... The Act proved ineffective and repealed in 1987 and replaced with the Land Disputes Tribunal Act which came into force in 1992. However the new Act still retains many of the provisions of the Magistrates Jurisdiction Amendment Act and is proving ineffective in resolving the real issue at the heart of tenure related disputes which is: to what extent can the registered owner of land exclude all other people from the land and with what consequences?"

1. Conflicts involving both Traditional & Modern Systems of Ownership

Conflict over tenure issues between communities, clans or ethnic groups that is of a local nature and does not assume national proportions in that, regardless of its seriousness, it is not perceived by the government or wider society as posing a threat to national unity. This kind of conflict often has both an economic and cultural premise. The difference between this and the first type of conflict is that members of the protagonist groups perceive it as threatening their collective livelihood and well being. In cases where this kind of conflict takes place between two clans, ethnic or interest groups, for example, members of these groups feel threatened by it regardless of where it takes place and even if they do not know any of those people who are directly affected. So, a member of the Gabra community living in Mombasa feels directly affected by conflict that pits members of his community against, say, the Pokot as far away as Marsabit District. As a result, the protagonists in these kinds of conflict often don't perceive the national legal system as having jurisdiction over the situation since the conflict appeals to a 'higher' collective notion of clan or ethnic group. Subsequently, even though the state can intervene to try and deal with this kind of conflict, ultimate resolution is reliant on traditional mechanisms which, because of the collective nature of the conflict, enjoy greater legitimacy in the eyes of the affected groups rather than the national legal system which understands the various players as individuals rather than parts of an organic whole.

This kind of conflict is inextricably intertwined with the perceptions of various groups and communities as to what constitutes living space/land and property which is theirs in the collective cultural sense. These perceptions undermine the credibility of the national legal system in attempting to resolve certain types of land-related conflict since there is no constitutional recognition of living space/land that belongs to Luos, Kambas, Maasais, Gikuyus etc, as a group. There is no such thing as Gikuyuland yet Gikuyus as a community have a chunk of Kenya that they consider exclusively Gikuyu. On the other hand there is a major contradiction when one considers that Kenya's district and provincial boundaries were drawn up in the colonial era on the basis of ethnic specifics perceived by the colonial administration. This contradiction will occasionally erupt in violence accompanied by statements made by leaders to the effect that, "this or that community has encroached our ancestral lands". In Kenya these kinds of conflict have been most prevalent between opposing pastoralist communities and between pastoralists and sedentary agricultural communities.

 

2. Conflicts Arising Out of Political Failure

Much of the serious land related violence in Kenya is meant to achieve an implicit or explicit political purpose which is articulated even if only in the minds of its instigators and perpetrators. In the public imagination, this type of conflict, no matter how localised in its geographical spread, is widely perceived as posing a threat to national unity because it signals a political failure so fundamental that traditional institutions have neither the capacity nor the environment to attempt conflict resolution. The incapacitation of national institutions as resolvers of these kinds of conflict is rendered total when one considers that it is very often the managers of these institutions who fan the flames of conflict in the first place and seek to profit politically from the resulting confusion. Examples of this in Kenya's history include the shifta secession war of the 1960s and the violence that gripped large parts of the Rift Valley in run-up to the 1992 elections. The shifta war was supported by the government of the then Somali dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre and the Rift Valley troubles were instigated by elements of the ruling party's political elite. In both cases, the leaders of those institutions that would have been integral to conflict resolution - the governments of Somalia and Kenya - were the ones who sought to profit most from the conflict. Since the most serious land related violence in Kenya occurs as a result of political failure, it is on this last category that this paper shall primarily dwell.

 

 

1. Land In Kenya
0. A Brief Historical Overview: The Gikuyu Question

The fruits of future conflicts over land in Kenya were actually laid during the colonial era by imperial policies meant to favour incoming white settlers. Travelling through Kenya in the 1950s, John Gunther was to observe that:

"The total white population in Kenya is 42,000 but only 4,000 whites are active settlers on the land, and only about 7,000 in all are engaged in agriculture. Roughly, Kenya has 68,700 acres of arable land. A minute handful of Europeans has 16,000 square miles or 24% of this; 5,500,000 Africans have to get along as best they can on the rest... Africans also live in the white highlands; these are mostly [G]ikuyu, of whom about 1,000,000 are squeezed into 2,000 square miles.."

In the competition for land that was to develop once Africans had the opportunity, the Gikuyu ethnic group were in an advantaged position; a position that was to place them at the center of much of the most serious land related violence in Kenya in the years to come:

"Location, size and wealth: all three factors helped render the Kikuyu a powerful competitor for land. Prior to the Mau Mau,.. nearly one third of the Kikuyu lived on the Highlands. Following their clearance from the Highlands and the subsequent military emergency, many reinfiltrated the Highland districts - Nyandarua, Naivasha and Nakuru - adjacent to their homelands. Kikuyu communities sprang up as well along the forested rim, particularly Burn[t] Forest, the Cherenagani and Nandi Hills, Molo, Njoro and Tinderet. Not only did physical location strengthen the land claims of the Kikuyu; so too did their numbers. Best estimates suggest that they accounted for 20% of Kenya's total population, making them the largest single ethnic group in Kenya. In addition, the Kikuyu were wealthy. They lived in highly productive ecological zones an so possessed access to the most valuable of Kenya's cash crops. They lived near the Nairobi market and could supply it at lower cost, and therefore with higher profits, than could others. They had reaped the benefits from military occupation, albeit at high cost. The security forces had created a dense network of rural roads. And pacification had featured the carrot as well as the stick, the carrot being a crash program of small farmer development..."

Organised political expression of fears that Rift Valley leaders from non-Gikuyu ethnic groups like the Kalenjin harboured regarding land, was rendered by the Kenya African Democratic Union that was created in part to oppose the settlement of 'outsider' communities in the Rift Valley. Robert Bates explains it like this:

"The groups incorporated into KADU wanted as much of the land vacated by the Europeans as they could get; they feared the competition of the Kikuyu, who, as tenants and laborers, were established on the ground, were numerous and driven by "land hunger,"and were rich. The party responded by advocating the adoption of a federal constitution, in which regional barriers would be erected to land settlement; within these divisions, the land market would be allowed to operate subject to oversight by regional political authorities...

"... Despite the merger of the two parties, the tensions between the major ethnic groups remained... In many areas in the Rift Valley, Kikuyu migrants sought to establish settlements, and local political leaders opposed their land claims... It was Moi who negotiated with the leaders... and quietened their militant opposition to the Kikuyu incursion... Moi thus proved a valuable ally to the Kanu elite. And following the withdrawal of the radicals from the party, Jomo Kenyatta promoted Moi to the vice presidency of KANU and the nation."

 

1. Dealing with Landlessness: Grappling with the Gikuyu Question?

At independence, therefore, land was already an explosive issue, especially in the Rift Valley. Attempts to deal with the problem of landlessness started prior to independence. In 1954, the Swynerton Plan saw land adjudicated, consolidated and registered in the highland small holder areas of Kenya. This process left many Gikuyu - especially those who were once squatters on settler farms in the Rift Valley - landless. There were a few settlement schemes initiated by the colonial Land Development and Settlement Board before 1962 but as Professor Okoth Ogendo tells us, "[N]one of [these] schemes were sufficient to diffuse political pressures for the distribution of land to landless Africans, which organisations such as the Land and Freedom Army were asking for."

The first large-scale settlement scheme to try and cope with the land problem was initiated in 1962 - the Million Acre Scheme. It had three components:

Ø High Density Holdings, composed of land totalling about 970,000 acres, to be divided into units averaging 25 acres each.

Ø Low Density Holdings, composed of land totalling about 180,000 acres, to be divided into units averaging 40 acres each. These two components were financed by the British, West German and Kenyan governments.

Ø Finally, you had the so called, 'Z' Holdings, which were made up of about 260 plots of 100 acres each, carved around the homesteads of former European farmers. The `Z' holdings often came with a house and other extras.

By 1971, when the Million Acre Scheme was wound up, 35,000 families had been settled on 1.76 million acres at a cost of nearly 30,000,000 Kenya pounds. Settlers had to pay for the land they settled on and, "[t]he general result was that the majority of the people who actually settled were far from being landless - the people who had given the political impetus for the scheme. Instead, it was the already small-scale farmer who had managed to accumulate some money... who got admission to the scheme...[I]t [thus] became necessary after 1965 for the government to adopt a different approach with regard to the landless..."

In 1965, the government set up the office of the Special Commissioner for Squatters with the aim of settling squatters on abandoned or mismanaged European farms. In these schemes, plots averaged 10 acres and by May of 1966, approximately 46,000 squatters had been registered by the office of the commissioner. By 1970, 13,000 of these had been settled "on some 29 haraka schemes covering nearly 148,000 acres of land scattered all over Central, Coast, Eastern and Rift Valley Provinces. The remaining 33,000 squatters were handed over to the Settlement Fund Trustees (SFT) when the office of Commissioner was abolished.." From 1970 onwards, squatters were settled on land under the so-called shirika schemes. Land under these schemes did not have to be paid for by those who settled on it and estates that were established were managed by managers provided by the SFT. By the time Kenyatta died, such large-scale settlement schemes were no longer a feature of economic and political life; and, it was left to the private land buying companies to attempt to fill their place. "Between 1963 and 1983, for example, 24,000 private land buying companies were registered in Kenya. These were individuals or groups forming cooperative societies that would offer to sell memberships or shares to raise funds for the purchase of large scale farms and ranch land. Some, land buying firms comprised the landless while others were made up of the affluent. This proliferated to the point where the organisation of land buying companies became a focus or a means of self actualization for the bourgeois class. Political careers were built on the management of such firms with members as the political base."

It is perhaps an indication of how sensitive and serious an issue land is that, a month after he took over from Kenyatta, one of President Moi's first wide-reaching official pronouncements was in regard to land:

"In September 1978 President Moi announced that the allocation of plots was suspended because `there were too many people with too much land trying to get more when most Kenyans had none'. There were calls for `a national land reform' and for ceilings to be put on land ownership by an individual."

There were deeper reasons for Moi's sensitivity. As the Weekly Review was to write much later:

"To this day there are Kalenjin leaders who still habour a grudge against the president for his handling of the settlement issue (the settlement if Gikuyus in what the Kalenjin considered their ancestral Rift Valley lands after independence)."

 

 

2. The Pastoralist Question

Livestock pastoralism is a food production system in which a human community relies on domestic livestock - cattle, camels, goats and sheep - for basic subsistence in the form of milk, meat, blood, and the market sale of stock to purchase other foods, particularly grains. Pastoralism is distinguished from livestock ranching by the fact that herds are taken to pasture and water, rather than having grass brought to them, and by the fact that human herders rely on their animals primarily for milk rather then beef or sale. The mainly pastoral groups in Kenya are the Maasai, Samburu, Turkana, Il Chamus (Njemps), Rendile, Boran, Gabra, Boran, Sakuye, Orma, Ogaden, Ajuran, Gurreh and Degodia (the last four are Somali clans). Dominated as it has been by peoples from sedentary agricultural communities, it is perhaps not surprising that the pastoralists of Kenya have always been marginalised politically and economically. To the typical sedentary agriculturalist, whose attachment to land is almost mythical, the pastoralist way of life where one's wealth and status is dependant one the size of one's herds, has always seemed backward. Thus the implicit assumption by planners through the years that to really 'develop' people must necessarily be settled. Elliot Fratkin writes:

"...[L]ivestock pastoralism is viewed as primitive, unproductive, wasteful. The idea of people moving their houses with their animals, distant from town resources, and living in unsafe conditions is abhorrent to many sedentary agricultural populations."

Examined from this perspective, the Rift Valley problems were partly also a deadly affirmation of cultural and ethnic uniqueness on the part of the pastoralists. Indeed, several factors since independence have served to severely limit the amount of land available to Kenya's pastoralists and their herds. The creation of game parks and reserves by the government after independence was one factor, for example. Most importantly however, at independence land was subdivided and registered under individual title - a concept that is hostile to the pastoralist way of life.

To the pastoralist, land is considered communal property and is held by a particular family, clan or other group. It is shared with newcomers after they have obtained the necessary permission, from elders, to use it's resources - including water, pasture and salt licks. After independence, the government encouraged the wholesale privatisation of formerly communal lands by developing group ranches and individual private titles for ranchers and farmers. Pastoralists, once again, found the size of their grazing lands falling, and their access to vital resources like water limited because the new owners of land had fenced it off. This discrepancy between the pastoralist concept of communal land and modern concepts of private land ownership continues have serious political implications.

Generally, an acute shortage of land has developed in the high potential agricultural areas of Kenya, causing a large number of Kenyans from agricultural communities to buy land from and settle in what was once the dry season grazing land of pastoralists. For example, the population of Kajiado District rose from 22,000 to 86,000 in 1969 and 149,000 in 1979. This growth was primarily the result of Gikuyu and Kamba agriculturalists migrating into Maasai lands to escape overcrowding in the central highlands. The potential for conflict here can not be overstated and competition for land between agriculturalists and pastoralists has formed the backdrop for violent conflicts over land in recent years, especially in the Rift Valley.

"Similar processes of rural immigration of agriculturalists in semi-arid lands are also occurring in Samburu District (3.92% growth in 10 years) and Laikipia (4.56%). Larger than average growth rates are also reported in Nakuru (5.0%), Uasin Gishu (3.8%) and Trans-Nzoia (4.16%), primarily of [G]ikuyu and Kalenjin farmers who today are locked into deadly conflict over occupation of these fertile Rift Valley districts."

3. The Unanswered Question of Land Reform in Kenya

Today, land remains one of the most explosive subjects in the politics of Kenya's agricultural economy. It is perhaps an indication of the extent to which the push towards political pluralism in the early 1990s was externally conceived that none of the political players, even the new parties, articulated an agenda that touched on land reform. Koigi wa Wamwere, the most consistent advocate of wide-reaching land reform in Kenya, once wrote:

"Economically, inequality in land ownership in Kenya is comparable to inequality in South Africa. In South Africa, 16% of the population, made up of whites, own 87% of the land. In Kenya 10% of the top class own 73% of all the land."

There are few issues that cause Kenya's ruling class greater collective discomfort than land. Wamwere once again:

"When President Moi came to power in 1978, one of the few positive things he said then was that land prices were too high for the poor man to afford. Land, he said, should cost no more than 500 shillings per acre. As a believer in land reform, I believe in a ceiling not only on land ownership but on land prices as well. I therefore, agreed entirely with the president but could not understand why he was not doing anything to help the country realise a ceiling in both land ownership and land prices... [I]n April 1980 I took to parliament a motion that called upon parliament to resolve that land should not cost more than 500 shillings an acre... [W]hen the motion came to parliament I noticed it was opposed by rich MPs and the entire cabinet. That the rich were opposing the motion was easy to understand. However, I did not expect Moi's front-bench to oppose the motion. I thought they would have been first to support it since it was drawn upon a presidential public statement. But I was definitely wrong. The president had specifically instructed his ministers to come to the house and kill the motion. Often, ministers don't attend parliamentary sessions. That day, they came to the house running and panting...

Later, Moi summoned me to his Kabarak home to warn me against calling for land reform and allowing myself to be used by other people to say things in parliament... "This land you are talking about is a dangerous issue", Moi warned me," Remember that the people who will be first to oppose you are your own Kikuyu people who have large tracts of land. Land in this country belongs mainly to Kikuyus and Kalenjins and it is mainly them who will lose land if it is redistributed as you want."

A parliament that sought to address the problems of poverty and inequality in Kenya, to redistribute wealth more equitably - while recognising the reality of Kenya's predominately rural agricultural economy - would one day be forced to try and bring about a more equitable distribution of Kenya's second most valuable resource after her people - land - unless technological advancements increase agricultural productivity rapidly in the densely populated highlands and less densely populated semi-arid lands. On the issue of redistributing land, or introducing a land tax to limit individual holdings of land or any other such radical measures, as we shall see, Kenya's two African ruling elites were implicitly of one opposed mind.

Over the past two decades an increasing number of commentators have stressed the need for some kind of land reform in Kenya. For example:

"[The] massive increase in the numbers of people seeking to obtain an income wholly or partly from the land is taking place in a country in which there are severe limits on the availability of cultivatable land. Almost all the readily accessible cultivatable land has already been claimed... Certainly, if land redistribution is left much beyond the end of the century it will be too late: there simply will not be enough land to go round. In that case the temptation to resort to militarism to extend the land frontier will also become increasingly pressing, whatever regime takes power."

Another example:

"Even an effective population policy is bound to take a good many years before it brings appreciable results, however, and something needs to be done in the meantime. Further land reforms are one option that could reduce the already intense pressure on the land. A proposal to limit the amount of land any one individual may own was placed on Kenya's agenda by the ILO in 1972 and the arguments in favour of it have scarcely weakened since then." [T]he growth process has had its casualties. Ownership of land is highly unequal, particularly in the large farm areas, and concentration is probably increasing."

By the late 1980s the Economist Intelligence Unit was publishing reports on Kenya that said the following:

"Even if improvements in the efficiency of marketing and pricing worked as the [World] Bank suggests (and this is in dispute), a reconsideration of land policy cannot be long postponed. One recent study has calculated that more than 3,000,000 viable new farms could be created for redistribution based on a 3 hectare ceiling on holdings. The study argues that these smaller farms would be more efficient than larger farms (and would also expand the domestic market, allowing the build-up of an efficient domestic industry as a base for manufactured exports). However, the political problems raised by this issue are enormous."

Few politicians have ever had the courage to advocate land reform persistently in Kenya. In the Moi era, Koigi wa Wamwere stands out in this regard. Prior to this, during the Kenyatta years, it is common knowledge that one of the important reasons behind the divergence of opinions between President Jomo Kenyatta and his then vice president, the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, was land. When he left KANU and formed the Kenya People's Union (KPU), the land policy the new party articulated was dramatically different from KANU's:

"A radical change in land policy is obviously necessary... The KPU's land programme includes the following measures [, for example]:

Point one - Distribution of land to the neediest, including squatters and those who lost their lands in the struggle for independence, either by expropriation or through land consolidation... Point five - The KPU will fight for a reduction in the size of farms held by individuals. It believes that this is an absolutely necessary measure..."

By the time Jaramogi Oginga led FORD in the runup to the 1992 elections he had softened his radical position on land. Indeed, observers noted that none of the fledgling political parties presented an agenda to Kenyans that was radically different from the ruling party's. They all trumpeted the standard IMF/World Bank line and ultimately offered little more than a chance to change the president's ethnic group.

 

 

 

2. Competition Between Elites
0. Historical Background to Kenya's Elites

"Once they achieved power, instead of transforming the colonial state in conformity with the democratic aspirations of a relatively large proportion of the nationalist movement, the elites perpetuated it. Those intellectuals who succeeded the colonial ethnographers and administrators promoted concepts such as the single party and the planned economy in order to have control of the accumulative machinery of the state. When disappointment led to opposition, post colonial states ossified and turned into machines of repression, as arbitrary, if not more so, as those of the colonial period. This situation had two consequences. Not only did rural societies withdraw into vertical alliances, but the state itself become an object of rivalry between groups defined by vertical solidarities of kinship, clientism, or, in a broad sense, ethnicity... Rather than being ethnic in the proper sense of the word, the wars which are prominent in modern Africa are rather conflicts between competing pillars of vertical solidarity in which the populace is more the victim than an agent. In the case of Rwanda, violence was originally the work of various militia manipulated by factions rather than a clear ethnic conflict pitting two 'nations' absolutely and systematically against one another."

It can be argued that the clamour for political pluralism in Kenya, that led to the historic multi-party elections of December 1992, was as much the culmination of a generalised struggle by Kenyans against a culture of mediocrity, economic mismanagement, corruption and political repression; as it was the organised political expression of a fierce competition between two elites in Kenyan society. One elite was largely composed of the wealthy Gikuyu families from Central Province whose primary economic interests lay in the export of coffee and tea. The other elite, the one that holds power to this day, was mostly made up of members of the Kalenjin ethnic group and their allies, whose economic interests were mainly in the grain growing areas of the Rift Valley. The economic interests of both elites shared a common historical base - land. The unprecedented land related violence that took place mainly in the Rift Valley before and after the elections must be considered in light of the competition between these two elites: one, rich and numerous, that was formerly in power but now alienated from the center and the other smaller group, in power, and in the process of accumulating.

The Gikuyu coffee and tea elite was essentially a colonial creation necessitated by British indirect rule. To rule Kenya the colonial authorities needed chiefs and these they plucked from the ranks of porters, mercenaries and other such people who had served them. Professor Godfrey Muriuki writes:

"Faced with this problem (the problem of finding African administrators to enforce colonial rule in the villages and locations) the [British] administrative officers turned to the motley crowd of mercenaries who had served them as porters, guides or askaris and created them 'chiefs'... [These chiefs] used their positions to enrich themselves, while their hangers-on, the njama, flouted the traditional code of behavior by harassing all and sundry, in particular, the girls... [The njama] had no official salary and consequently had to live off the people. Wherever they went, they commandeered whatever they fancied - food or livestock. They even ordered girls to sleep with them... The chiefs over-reached themselves and took other people's wives and property by force to force them kutii sheria (to obey the law)..."

The newly created elite was to gain even more power during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, that saw poor and landless Gikuyu make war against the British settlers and their African collaborators. These collaborators had prospered by virtue of their partnership with the colonialists and by the very nature of Gikuyu systems of land ownership.

"In the fight against Mau Mau, the British cleared the Highlands of Kikuyu squatters; they cleared Nairobi of Kikuyu laborers. And, moving northward along the foot of the Aberdares, they severed the connection between the mountains and reserves, isolating the armed forces in the mountains forests from their sources of information, recruits, and weapons. They then reestablished military and administrative control of each of the Kikuyu districts. In each district, they sought allies. The colonial government readily enlisted the support of those whom the insurgents had attacked: the wealthy, the landed, and those educated in mission schools... While applying the stick on the one hand, the government offered a carrot with the other. With the cooperation of the Kikuyu elites, the government implemented an intensive program of rural development: one designed to bring prosperity to the reserves through the growing of cash crops. In the fight against Mau Mau, the aggressive elites of the Kikuyu reserves thus gained even greater access to the coercive power and economic resources of the colonial government. Mau Mau convinced the British that no white minority could hold power in Kenya. The Mau Mau rebellion therefore brought independence to Kenya. And the defeat of Mau Mau meant that when power was seized by the indigenous inhabitants of Kenya, it was seized by the conservative fraction of Kenya's rural society: those with a commitment to accumulation, investment, and private property."

And so it was that the Kenyatta government, with its roots firmly among the conservative elite of Central Province, took power after independence.

"The severe restrictions on the Kikuyu [during the Mau Mau] re-established the political control of the African petty bourgeoisie among them (ie as opposed to the Mau Mau rank and file members who might have been thrown into leadership during a successful guerrilla campaign); restrictions also isolated the radical example from other regions - where nationalism therefore developed more conventionally... The result was accession to power by the petty bourgeoisie nationalist leadership, with the support of small-scale peasants and increasingly better paid urban workers, and to the exclusion of those poor and landless who formed the most potent Mau Mau base. The dynamics of the process resulted in Kikuyu pre-eminence in the new government."

With the collapse of KADU, which crossed the floor to join KANU in 1964, the coffee and tea elite, then in alliance with the Luo under Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, became the preeminent political force in Kenya. The process of accumulation of wealth and resources by this group and its allies, had began. Buoyed by good coffee and tea prices and a buoyant economy, the elite prospered during the first 15 or so years after independence. As a nation Kenya was presented to the world in the international press as an African showcase. Even though the country's economic performance started to decline after the sudden rise in oil prices of 1973, observers could not help gushing that everything seemed to be going Kenya's way. One, for example, wrote:

"Great advances were made in the welfare of ordinary people during the first fifteen years of independence... The yield of taxation increased nearly seven times between 1964/5 and 1976/7. Recurrent expenditure increased only five times in the same period, so that the balance of recurrent revenue and expenditure moved form a deficit in the first few years after independence to a surplus which made a substantial contribution to the finance of government capital expenditure... The price of coffee started to rise from the middle of 1975: a year later it had risen to 182% and was continuing upward. At its peak in April 1977 the price was more than six and a half times what it had been in the middle of 1975... The small farms doubled their output of coffee between 1964 and 1975, their area under tea between 1971 and 1975, and the value of their gross marketed production between 1970 and 1975. Their output of cash crops has continued to increase."

Mzee Jomo Kenyatta died on August the 22nd, 1978 and his vice president Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, from the smaller Rift Valley-based Kalenjin community, assumed the presidency. The Kenyatta era, despite being fraught with growing inequalities in Kenyan society; can be said to have been a time when the interests of the ruling elite often coincided with the economic interests of wananchi. By and large, ordinary Kenyans became richer and enjoyed better services than they had done under the British. Between, 1963 and 1973, for example, Kenya achieved an annual GDP growth rate of around 6.6%.

"[B]etween 1964 and 1972], both agriculture and manufacturing, the key sectors of the economy grew rapidly at 4.6% and 8% per annum respectively. The expansion of agriculture was stimulated by the redistribution of large estates to smallholders and the rapid growth of smallholders' output, from less than one-third of marketed agricultural output in 1963 to more than half by 1972. The rapid growth in manufacturing was made possible by, among other things, rising domestic incomes, in large measure reflecting rising agricultural income.".

When Moi assumed the presidency in 1978, Kenya's economy had slowed considerably from the highs of the mid and late-sixties and early seventies. Even the temporary coffee boom of 1976/7 proved to be fleeting and inflationary, it could not stop the general economic slow down that had started in 1974 - after the 1973 'oil shock'. Besides, the price of coffee, then Kenya's main export crop, was in decline in 1978. Also, the East African Community collapsed in 1978, limiting one of Kenya's most important markets for manufactured goods - by the mid-1960s, 20% of the country's manufactured exports went to Uganda and Tanzania. There was a second 'oil price shock' in 1979 and this was coupled with unfavorable external terms of trade and declining export volumes. A severe drought in 1979/80 and world recession in 1980-2 only made things worse for the new administration.

Moi's rise to power was accompanied by the growth of a new elite around him; one that was drawn from his old KADU constituency of small tribes. As he consolidated his grip on power in the years immediately following Kenyatta's death, the coffee and tea barons of Central Province were replaced by a new group of power brokers mainly from his Kalenjin ethnic group, who had their base in the grain growing Rift Valley Province. It was soon obvious that the institutional center of power was no longer organisations like the KPCU (coffee) and the KTDA (tea), but the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB). The NCPB, which was then called the Maize and Produce Board, came sharply into focus during the 1980 drought. While a new Rift Valley-based elite was beginning its term, many of the richer members of the coffee and tea elite, who served as civil servants in Kenyatta's days, stood for parliament in the 1979 and 1983 general elections and many succeeded. Others retreated into private business. Suddenly starved of the easy credit they used to enjoy from state and parastatal banks, some opened their own finance houses and used these to bankroll their affairs. All the while, however, so long as their economic interests were not harmed, most of them continued to, "sing the KANU tune" as it were and generally avoided confrontation with the new Rift Valley elite that was replacing them. In 1975 there were only 12 commercial banks in Kenya, by 1988 the number had doubled. In 1975 there were only eight Non-Bank Financial Institutions (NBFIs), by 1988 there were 54. Between 1976 and 1983, the total assets of NBFIs grew from KSh.2 billion to KSh.12.5 billion. When Moi assumed power, stating a commitment to following in Kenyatta's footsteps (nyayo), to the Central Province elite this meant continued protection of their property and a continuation of the status quo that had seen them become so prosperous: they therefore supported him.

Politically, the alliance between the two elites started to change after Kenya became a defacto one party state in 1982, which was followed by the attempted coup on August 1st the same year. The regime shed its populist image and more widespread repression ensued. Moi's alliance of convenience with the Gikuyu would never be the same again. In 1986, the local banking scene had been gripped by a crisis that had a profound psychological effect on the old Central Province elite. A number of 'indigenous' banks, mostly owned by members of the old elite, collapsed between 1986 to 1987 - many of these institutions were owned by Gikuyus with links to the old elite. Their economic and political confidence in the Moi regime was given a powerful jolt. The siege mentality grew and ominous rumblings could be heard at functions and meeting attended by the Gikuyu elite. The Economist Intelligence Unit summarized the political situation in Kenya thus:

"In recent months President Moi has centralised power further by removing the security of tenure of High Court judges and increasing the police's powers to detain suspects without trail. In doing this he is placing himself in a dangerously exposed position. His fundamental strategy appears to be to entrust commanding the heights of government to a Kalenjin-Maasai axis, while relying on economic growth among the smallholders of Central Province and the charisma of his Kikuyu vice president to hold the loyalty of the large and economically powerful Kikuyu grouping."

"During the coffee and tea boom of 1985 to early 1987... a high proportion of sales of from smallholder exports has always accrued to the Kikuyu, hence economic prosperity could compensate for any sense of relative political exclusion. Now it is much more difficult. Earnings from coffee and tea are in decline..."

Everything came to a head politically in 1988. With general elections in the offing, the ruling party declared that party nominations for parliamentary candidates would be held using a queue voting system that would have voters lining up behind the candidate of their choice. It was added that, any candidate who garnered 70% of the vote or more during these nominations would be elected to parliament unopposed. The infamous mlolongo (queue) voting elections of March 1988 afforded the new Rift Valley elite its opportunity to complete its political consolidation and finally dump the Gikuyu vice president Mwai Kibaki. An orchestrated clamour against Kibaki built up and finally culminated in an edition of The Weekly Review, that launched an unprecedented verbal mauling of the vice president.

"It was not the first time Kibaki had gone out of his way to publically distance himself from the government on key issues, but most observers believe that it was probably the last time he would do so - as vice president."

With Mwai Kibaki no longer a heartbeat away from the presidency; and with many members of the old elite alienated from the political mainstream (some of them suspended from the ruling party); with their businesses apparently under threat - the same wazee who had once enthusiastically called on Moi to detain his opponents started to speak the language of liberal democrats. The Berlin Wall had fallen and some of the most reactionary political figures in Kenya's post-independence history started to sing the new songs of change, democracy, transparency, accountability, good governance... This set the stage for a political contest between the two elites that, the author would like to argue, set the stage for the politically instigated land-related violence that started in the country in September of 1991.

3. Land and Elites: What Conflict?
0. "Ethnic violence is not an irrational expression of atavistic biological impulses. It is a political strategy to achieve tangible political and economic benefits. It is about who gets what; about who will benefit, who will lose, in purely economic terms. Ethnic struggles are basically economic struggles for the control of ownership, distribution and management of resources."

Land related conflict is a feature of life in Kenya. The most serious violence in the post-independence period, however took place between 1991 and 1994 and was inextricably intertwined with political changes that were forced on the government of President Moi in the early 1990s. The violence was originally tied to calls by members of the ruling elite for a majimbo constitution in response to demands for political pluralism. Over 300,000 Kenyans were displaced and over 2,000 killed during the violence which started its life described as 'land clashes' between members of the president's ethnic group and other communities mainly in the Rift Valley. It quickly became apparent that what was happening were not land clashes and the press started to describe what was happening as 'ethnic clashes'. Later it was described as politically engineered ethnic cleansing. In truth the unprecedented violence was all of the above. It was political because it was obviously meant to serve a specific political purpose; it was also about land because tensions over land formed the backdrop to the events; and, it was also ethnic because it was also an expression of fear by leaders from communities at the core of President Moi's support base that political pluralism would mean their marginalisation. Research conducted by the Kenya Human Rights Commission found that the following issues were raised as being ultimately responsible for the clashes:

a. disputed transfers of land sold through individuals agreements and others which the Land Boards seem o have encouraged by not solving as required administratively and by legal process.

b. disputed sub-divisions in land buying co-operative societies, companies and partnerships.

c. incessant stock theft.

d. lack of civic education to citizens on the practice of multi-partyism, hence construing the membership of different parties as inevitable ground for open hostility to be settled physically.

e. the quest for ethnic superiority or jingoism.

f. rivalry arising from the over-staffing of political and administrative positions by members of one ethnic community in a multi-ethnically settled locality.

g. perennial rivalry and envy over commercial concerns."

The 1992 Kiliku Parliamentary Select Committee formed to investigate the clashes found evidence of a strong sense of historical injustice on the part of members of communities viewed as the aggressors in the conflict. An example:

"Mr Samwel K. Moiben stated that leaflets were circulated in December 1991 threatening the Sabaot. Thereafter, fighting on 25th December. He alleged that the police and GSU were partisan and were taking sides with the Bukusu, even to the extent of leading them inthe burning of houses. He alleged that despite the recommendation of the 1932 Carter Land Commission that the Sabaot be given 80,000 acres and £2,000(Sterling) per family as compensation for their land, nothing was done and that over 40,000 Sabaot remain landless to date. He claimed that the Bukusu look down upon the Sabaot calling them cattle rustlers. Fighting erupted because FORD followers were saying that if FORD ever came to power, the Sabaot would be forced into Uganda."

A constant refrain of the President's as pressure built up in the early 1990s for his regime to liberalise politically, was that multi-partyism would led to dangerous ethnic fractures. The conflict in the Rift Valley, combined with the fact that Kenyans voted along ethnic lines anyway seemed to lend credence to this way of thinking. Addressing a meeting at the National Ploughing Contest Finals in Nakuru on Saturday the 16th of November, 1991, the president was reported as having complained about the "contemptuous manner in which foreigners approached African issues [that] showed clearly that they despised Africans." He went on to explain that "multi-partyism would be introduced when Kenyan communities were cohesive enough to ensure a smooth and trouble free change... Before 1963", he added, "Kenya was a collection of quarreling tribes, adding that unity should be strengthened further so that the new political arrangement, when introduced, would be guided by higher national ideals and not narrow tribal sentiments."

Prominent pro-democracy activist and Nairobi lawyer, Kiraitu Murungi, has explored a number of reasons for ethnic eruptions in the multi-party era. He explains their causes:

"(a) They are a resurgence of pre-colonial barbarism and savagery of Africans. That Africans were a collection of 'warring tribes' before the white man civilized them.

(b) That ethnic eruptions are the historical products of colonialism which divided Africans into different groups, some of which were favoured in terms of resource allocation and access to the tools of modernity. Political pluralism allowed the marginalised groups to express their dissatisfaction.

(c) Ethnic eruptions as a product of political opportunism by unprincipled, unscrupulous, selfish politicians: essentially elites resorting to ethnic mobilization and deliberate violence to hold onto power at any cost.

(d) Ethnic eruptions as the product of the undeveloped politics of Kenya's 'uncaptured' peasantry:

"Peasant politics is predominantly local with a political vision that is limited to immediate local interests. It is difficult to mobilise rural people around broad issues related to overall development of society. They have to be mobilised around concrete local demands such as land, roads, schools and hospitals, which have immediate tangible benefits to the local community... The peasants have an instrumentalist theory of politics. They have no problems with corruption, nepotism, looting the treasury, undermining national interests, singing false praises, and short-changing other ethnic groups if doing so brings tangible material benefits to their families and the immediate local community. Kenyans have no ideological commitment to political parties.."

This means that all of Kenya's political parties are essentially ethnic and this fact cannot be escaped from.

(e) Ethnic disruptions as the logical product of ethnocracy: unfair distribution of economic and political power along ethnic lines."

 

1. Land, Democratisation, Pluralism and Ethnicity: The Dynamics of Land-Related Conflict

"The primary object of ethnic cleansing, as described by its advocates has been to maintain political and economic power in the hands of those wo have wielded it since 1978... Its secondary objective has been to effect a redistribution of wealth, particularly agricultural land, by expropriating one ethnic group's land and giving it to another..."

Much of the independent research into the unprecedented conflict that took place in the Rift Valley in the run-up to the last general election has concluded that, at the very least, the violence was fanned by senior members of the Moi government keen to prove that political pluralism was not workable in Kenya. But while it was an elite project designed to assure the political survival of a relatively small number of powerful individuals serious issues underlay it, not least among which was land. In the emotional atmosphere bred by the violence these important issues slipped into the background; issues like the genuine fear of the smaller ethnic groups of domination by larger ones - a fear historically linked to the land question especially in the Rift Valley. Ironically, the extent of these fears was best characterized by comments made in 1993 by the second most powerful man in Kenya, the diminutive MP for Kerio South, Nicholas Biwott, President Moi's most trusted confidant - not a man given to public expressions of fear or weakness. At a public rally in June of 1993, he was reported to have made comments to the effect that, prior to the December 1992 elections, FORD Kenya and DP were already rejoicing, thinking that if they attained power "they would arrest and prosecute me and other KANU leaders; grab their land and confiscate their property... God knew their plan and that is why none of them won the elections... God... intervened to save the country from-anarchy."

The now infamous 'Majimbo rallies' held by senior members of the Moi regime in September of 1991 are widely held to having raised the political temperature in the country and laid the base for the violence that was to follow. In hindsight it is clear that the clamour for majimbo was to a large extent a giant scare tactic that played on the fears of pro-opposition ethnic groups (especially the Gikuyu) that they would lose land they had acquired in the Rift Valley if a majimbo constitution was implemented as a response to the clamour for pluralism. In fact, the whole majimbo issue did more than anything else to divide the ruling party in the run-up to the elections; divisions that were exacerbated by President Moi's conflicting political signals on his position with regard to the issue as it progressed. Actually, in August of 1991 the president went out of his way to publically reject calls for majimboism and he did so once again in September declaring that. "Any issue which confused and divided wananchi should not be allowed to continue. He also said that advocation of majimboism and multipartysim derailed Kenyans from national goals." However, ruling party hardliners like Shariff Nassir and Noor Abdi Ogle, among many others, continued the debate declaring that majimboism should be introduced if those calling for political pluralism did not stop their campaign.

If the majimbo crusade was merely an elaborate scare tactic, albeit founded partly on genuine fears of marginalisation on the part of the smaller ethnic groups, then that it happened at all and was followed by such extraordinary violence was indicative of a deeper malaise; a malaise that is partly responsible for the fact that land remains such an explosive issue in Kenya today. Indeed, writes Professor Mahmood Mamdani, colonially inspired power relations in African societies have made for a situation where the deterioration of multi-party politics into an altogether uglier high stakes ethnic race was all but inevitable. Land related conflict in Kenya should be viewed in this context.

"In the absence of the detribalisation of rural power, however, deracialisation could not be joined to democratisation. In an urban-centered reform, the rural contaminated the urban. The e tribal logic of Native Authorities easily overwhelmed the democratic logic of civil society. An electoral reform that does not affect the appointment of the native Authority and its chiefs - which leaves rural areas out of consideration as so many protectorates - is precisely the reemergence of decentralized despotism! In such a context, electoral politics turned out to be more than just who represents civil society because the victors in that contest would also have a right to rule over subjects through Native Authorities, for the winner would appoint chiefs, the Native Authority, everywhere..."

"... No less convincing, however, is the multiparty discourse of the so called prodemocracy movements in equatorial Africa. Unlike their single-party counterparts, theirs is an explicitly political discourse. But it has turned a concrete historical experience - of civil society in the West -into the basis for a general and prescriptive theory. It has thereby turned democracy into a turnkey institutional import. Arguing that the problem of Africa is the absence or weakness of civil society institutions, it speaks the language of exclusion and marginalisation, unable to unravel the form of power through which large numbers of Africans - in many cases the majority - are ruled."

It can be argued therefore, that major land related ethnic violence of the sort that Kenya suffered between 1991 and 1994 was more than just a frightened elite responding to the threat of losing power through ethnic mobilization. The very nature of power relations between the state and the rural peasant majority is ethnic in character and long-term conflict resolution with regard to land is a grand national project.

 

4. Conflict Resolution

"The issue of ethnic group competition in the present era of democratisation is one of control, not elimination. Managing conflict, channelling ethnic group conflict into competition, reducing and aiming for the elimination of violence in politics, that is the main issue. A democratisation process that tames ethnic conflict would include processes, and quite likely, outcomes that reward inter-ethnic coalition making and moderation of demands, and that share or divide power on a functional or territorial basis."

The most serious and persistent land related conflict in Kenya occurs as a result of political failure. Long term conflict resolution therefore requires a political solution. The most powerful political institution in Kenya is the Presidency but a fundamental lack of will on the part of Kenya's current president has hampered all efforts at resettling victims of the clashes. While President Moi has publically declared his will to resolve the issue several times since the last elections the furthest he has been willing to go is to resettle the clash victims on land other than on that which they lost. While the Church has been effective in relief, rehabilitation and conflict resolution at a local level in the areas hardest hit by the clashes, the government has been steadfast in ensuring that a political solution is not found to the issue.

The last determined effort to address the issue on a political level was made late in 1995 when groups of 'elders' from the GEMA (Gikuyu, Embu and Meru) and KAMATUSA (Kalenjin, Maasai, Turkana and Samburu) communities held a series of highly publicized reconciliation meetings. Elders from the GEMA communities that the author spoke to at the time expressed sincere excitement that Gikuyus evicted from their land in the Rift Valley would be resettled. This initiative was overwhelmed by the hostility of more hardline KAMATUSA leaders who objected to reaproachment with the Gikuyu.

It was also clear that the primary political benefit the KAMATUSA sponsors of this initiative (Nicholas Biwott in particular) hoped to accrue was a return of the Gikuyu to the ruling party. As things stood, the clashes had displaced upwards of 300,000 people - mainly opposition supporters. Thus destabilised, this sizeable chunk of voters was rendered ineffective as a block that would conceivably have contributed votes to the opposition and undermined KANU's strangle-hold on the Rift Valley's parliamentary seats. The central political cost to KANU here would be in those areas where opposition voters, while not in the majority, would have helped swing the presidential election tally against President Moi during the general election. When it became clear that this would not happen, after KANU lost a byelection in a predominately Gikuyu constituency (Kipipiri), the initiative lost its momentum and fizzled out.

0. The Presidency

Kenya's powerful presidency has been ineffective in facilitating resolution of the land crisis in the Rift Valley that was born out of the clashes which started in 1991. In the public mind an understandable perception has grown that President Moi does not have the will to resolve the issue. It is a perception buoyed by the fact that the president's closest political allies created the atmosphere for the clashes and almost all independent studies of the clashes concluded that the ruling elite had a hand in instigating the violence. The feelings of ordinary Kenyans with regard to ultimate presidential responsibility for the clashes have also been made clear and reported by the press. A good example is the time president Moi personally encountered the skepticism of the public during a-visit he made to one of the affected areas in April of 1992.

"On Monday this week, President Daniel arap Moi spent hours trying to cool tempers in Turbo as hundreds of clash victims who are camped in the town openly accused the government of failing to protect them. A spokesman for the group asked the president to-demonstrate his love for peace by taking a decisive step to end the clashes. He said it was a pity that, while Kenya was home to hundreds of foreign refugees, 'We are also-becoming refugees in our own country.' The man, who spoke in Swahili, said that he had been shot in the hip with an arrow and accused the security personnel of partiality. He told the president that the victims had witnessed scenes where known Nandi neighbours looted houses and took away cattle while the police 'just stood and watched'. Efforts by The Weekly Review to get to the man were thwarted by presidential security personnel. Before his address, the president held private consultations with Luhya and Kalenjin leaders from the affected areas. As the consultations were going on, the minister for cooperative development, Mr. John Cheruiyot, and a colleague both of whom looked agitated, joined the group and told the president that 'their' people had been prevented from coming there to listen to the president's address. Shortly afterwards, a team of-senior police officials was promptly dispatched and returned with a group of young men armed with sticks. As they approached, the seated crowds went wild accusing them of having looted and burnt their houses and for a moment, defying presidential entreaties that they calm down, tried to charge the group. The situation remained tense throughout the president's address, although he was cheered when he announced that he would deploy more General Service Unit personnel to the area. However, his plea with the displaced persons to return to their homes was met with cries of 'Which homes? Our houses have been burned.'"

 

1. Parliament

At various times opposition legislators have tried to raise the issue of the clashes in parliament but efforts to discuss them have been thwarted by the ruling party's numerical majority in parliament. In 1992 a 'Parliamentary Select Committee' was formed 'To Investigate the Ethnic Clashes in Western and Other Parts of Kenya'. chaired by Kennedy Kiliku. The committee's findings generally confirmed the opinion of many Kenyans that senior people in the government had a hand in the clashes. For example, the Kenyan press published first hand-testimony given before the committee by one,

"Valentine Uhuru Odipo alias Abdi Kadi arap-Kirgen. The 30 year old, ex-General Service Unit (GSU) officer alleged in his 79 page affidavit, produced before the committee that there was a private military training camp in the Maasai Mara-National Park to which he and other soldiers had been recruited in 1981 to serve the personal-interests of the powerful Kerio South member of parliament Mr Nicholas Biwott and that it was-from several such camps that ethnic clashes raiders emanated from and retreated to once they had-accomplished their missions... Odipo claimed in his affidavit, the warriors also received sanctuary-in the Molo farm of Vice President George Saitoti."

The findings of this committee were presented to parliament on September 18 1992, implicating senior KANU officials in the clashes, however, these were rejected by parliament on October 15 1992, after 55 MPs voted against it, compared with only 24 members who supported it's adoption. As a vehicle for conflict resolution, therefore, parliament's effectiveness is also dubious.

2. The Judiciary, Provincial Administration and Security Services

Kenya's security services and provincial administration have a reputation for speed and effectiveness in dealing with crisis when they occur especially when they have full political backing. Kenya's over-loaded courts can also be highly efficient when confronted with crisis situations and in the early days of the clashes they seemed to work quite well and did not collapse under the weight of new cases arising out of the violence. The number of suspects arrested and arraigned in court as a result of the clashes would appear to confirm the view that the country's courts can be extremely effective when they are not politically constrained, a fact confirmed by other organizations as well. As we have seen, however, the clashes in the run-up to the last general election were a political phenomenon.

"Normally the Kenya Police and state security machinery are very quick to contain real or perceived insecurity and violence in the country. however, the violence in the clash areas did not elicit the necessary response from the security machinery. The report found that in some instances, the security forces merely looked on as the attackers destroyed property and set homes ablaze. In other instances, the security forces disarmed the victims giving the attackers free rein in perpetrating their violence."

3. The Church

No other Kenyan institution that could ostensibly get involved in conflict resolution activities on a national scale has as much institutional credibility as the Church. It also has independent resources and a grass-roots network that is often more effective than even the powerful provincial administration. In many areas when violence breaks out people flee to churches and the same was the case during the 1991-94 clashes. By providing displaced Kenyans with temporary shelter, that in some cases has become semi-permanent, the Church has acted as an important safety valve in a situation where the underlying political cause of crisis remains unaddressed.

0. The Catholic Church in the Rift Valley

The conflict resolution activities of the Catholic Church have been extensive in the Rift Valley. The specific conflict resolution activities have included:

Ø Workshops for the communities ostensibly in conflict

Ø Visits by leaders and priests to the homes of members of communities in conflict

Ø Liaising constantly with the provincial administration on matters of security in the affected areas

Ø Providing temporary resettlement for displaced persons while a permanent solution is found (Found by who?)

The Church works through its extensive grass-roots network of small Christian communities, mass centres, parish councils, diocesan leaders etc. A spokesman for the Justice and Peace Commission that coordinates the Catholic Church's conflict resolution activities explained that while it has not been easy to assess the on-the-ground effectiveness of their work, last year in Olenguruone, during a conflict resolution meeting two women from opposed communities hugged each other with tears streaming down their faces. The spokesman felt that there was a definite air of remorse in the affected areas and some of the perpetrators of the violence insist that they shall never again let "politicians cheat them into doing the kinds of things" they did in 1991/2. Interestingly, this party also felt that if violence were to start up again in the run-up to the 1997 elections, the loss of life this time around would not be so serious, "because resistance would be minimal" - surely this indicates a failure of conflict resolution. Representatives of the Catholic Church who have worked in the Rift Valley that the author spoke to were categorical that, "the land issue remains an explosive one in the Rift Valley", as one of them put it.

1. The Catholic Church in Western Province

Was first involved in trying to deal with the land-related conflict when it erupted on 26/12/1991. The late Bishop Right Rev. Longinus Atundo, together with the diocesan development coordinator, Ms S. Elizabeth Kibuywa and others, visited the Mount Elgon area to assess the extent and effects of the conflict. The Bishop then issued a pastoral letter calling on Christians in Bugoma and Busia districts to come to the aid of the affected people. An Emergency Relief Committee was formed and between 1991 and late 1994, assisted a total of 28,000 displaced families. Several donors were approached to donate relief supplies. A Western Province Coordination Committee was then formed to monitor the overall relief work that the churches, NGOs and the government were involved in.

2. The NCCK (the example of Eldoret)

Started their work in the Rift Valley in January of 1992 and were mainly involved in relief work at first helping displaced people and only started conflict resolution and rehabilitation work in the early part of 1993. In the Eldoret area, for example, in October of 1993 they registered 41,000 displaced families who they were helping with food, farm inputs and other forms of rehabilitation. By early 1994 the figure had fallen to 33,000 and by the end of that year the figure was 26,000. By the end of 1996 they were only assisting 7,600 families. Areas like Cheptais, Burnt Forest, Kaptagat, Makutano, Endebess, Turbo and Tot, however, 'remain tense' and not all the displaced have been able to return. In 1996, they started concentrating exclusively on peace and reconciliation activities and by the time President Moi ordered a stop to these activities claiming they were subversive in September 1996, their workshops had been attended by over 5,600 participants. These workshops, aimed at promoting good neighborliness and formulating strategies to avert clashes, were attended by local councilors from all ethnic groups, leaders of cooperatives, church leaders, youth, women's groups leaders, educationalists etc. They had even managed to hold nine workshops for local administrators, including one for District Officers and another that was attended by both FORD Kenya and KANU members of parliament. Sources informed the NCCK that it was this last workshop that upset the president in particular. What is clear is that the Moi government views peace as a threat and therefore there does not exist in Kenya the will for peace that would be essential to long-term conflict resolution. However, the NCCK spokesperson felt that the performance of security services on the ground had performed well since the clashes. Land matters remain potentially explosive and problems are worsened by cattle rustling and poverty.

The author was left with the feeling that the 'land issue' remains so explosive in the Rift Valley that few people are trying to address it head-on.

 

5. Ethnic Living Space and the Crisis of the African State

The manner in which colonial authorities drew up local and national territorial boundaries in most African countries was based on a rather simplistic understanding of the nature of Africa's many ethnic communities. In many cases communities that understood themselves using quite different ideas were thrown together and designated 'Tribes' on the basis of similarities in language alone, for example. In other cases national borders split communities between countries while internal boundaries were invented to try an achieve an ethnic homogeneity in each province or district. These entities were governed via the system of indirect rule (as we have seen in the case of the creation of the Gikuyu landed elite), which was dependant on a created class of chiefs, headmen etc whose legitimacy was supposed to be contrived from local culture and systems of governance. In reality, the new class of 'tribal' administrator enjoyed powers that went far beyond anything known by local communities before. More importantly, traditional checks and balances did not apply to the new administrators. Mahmood Mamdani writes:

"In conservative states, which reproduced Native Authorities as a locus of a decentralized despotism, the prototype subject was stamped with an ethnic identity. In radical states, which detribalised Native Authorities but where reform degenerated into centralised despotism - most dramatically illustrated when the central state branded poor and unemployed urban residents as vagrants and forcibly repatriated them to their 'home areas' in the countryside - the prototype subject was simply a poor inhabitant in the rural areas, a peasant".

It would not be unreasonable to argue in light of the above that the legacy of colonialism created distinct ideas of 'ethnic living space' within newly independent African states that were in contradiction with new systems of land ownership in the modern state. In Kenya where the system of indirect rule was perpetuated by the post-independence state via a powerful provincial administration, these contradictions are stark. On the one hand different ethnic groups have fixed ideas of what traditionally constitutes "our land", while on the other hand modern systems of land ownership are directly opposed to this.

"The onset of the violence in the Rift valley was originally perceived to be based on land disputes between different ethnic groups inhabiting the area. The Rift Valley has some of the best arable land in Kenya... Prior to colonial settlement, it was originally the home of pastoralist peoples scattered through the area. The major ethnic groups that claim ancestry in the province include the Maasai, the Kalenjin, the Samburu, the Turkana and sections of the Luhya community."

It is therefore that in the run-up to the last elections leaders were able to mobilise sentiments for the own political purposes that were based on this contradiction. For example, speaking at a political rally in February of 1992, William ole Ntimama, was reported to have denied organizing "tribal clashes in Narok or financing Kanu youthwingers to harass members of the opposition." He went on to explain "that opposition parties were after the fertile and productive Maasai land" and that FORD was "divided on tribal lines and all that the opposition leaders want is to grab your fertile land... We must protect our land from the FORD members. They should know we are capable of protecting our rights, our national heritage, our political rights and prosperity. They must understand we are prepared to defend our rights at any price."

With the onset of multi-partyism, therefore, Africans trapped in a system of relations with the State that understands them as tribesmen and tribeswomen, created political parties on that fundamental basis. According to Glickman and Furia, whats happening in Africa is part of the larger process of post-colonial reallocation of political authority that was distorted by the cold war which allowed rationalising support for all manner of dictatorial regimes. Phase One of the modernisation of politics saw the centralisation of authority following colonially inspired models that were enthusiastically adopted by fledgling African elites who used central control of economies to create patronage machines that suppressed political competition, In the second phase, "we are witnessing a pluralisation of politics by elite competition which we suspect to be leading mobilised ethno-national and ethno-cultural groupings... Africa's continuing ethnic conflict may stymie democratisation. Ethnic groupings naturally form parties in a democratising situation, since democratic competition induces a community to prevent exclusion from the rewards of victory, based on past experience of politics in African states... The major issue is the perception of permanent exclusion by a minority or majority"

The nature of the African state - a centralised patronage machine - is changing. It has been considerably weakened by economic and political liberalisation and Africa's 'tribes'; 'tribal' thinking; 'tribal' demands and other things 'tribal' have been released from the bottle of the one party state. Communities are revolting against the 'perception of permanent exclusion'; against the threat of collective economic marginalisation; communities are rising up against the idea of living in permanent insecurity. At the most basic level the activities of a highly organised but also highly insecure Tutsi minority in the Great Lakes region has helped bring about major change in countries like Rwanda and Zaire. It can be argued that the Tutsi are fighting for ethnic living space where they can live without fear of extermination. This raises the threat of balkanisation. However, it also provides the opportunity for new elites - organised and disciplined by years of struggle - but still surrounded by potential military threats to explore forms of governance that have not been taken seriously in Africa before. The trend towards greater ethnic self assertion looks set to continue in countries where colonial power structures have basically gone unreformed.

What is clear is that issues that have never been raised before are being raised by Africans everywhere and the state no longer has the resources or absolute central control it had during the Cold War to 'keep a lid' on these often contradictory forces that writhe under the skin of many African countries. In his keynote address during a conference on Democracy in a Multi-Ethnic Society held in Nairobi in 1994, the respected Kenyan scholar Professor Ali A. Mazrui, said the following:

"We need to find a solution to this problem of internal colonisation. The coast has been colonised by non-coastal Kenyans both politically and economically... Ethnicity and tribalism will be with us for at least another century. In the past, we treated ethnicity like an enemy of the state and sought to suppress it. The continent lost three-million lives in the process secessionism, civil wars, assassinations, civil conflict. Now we must learn to accommodate ethnicity as a fact of life in our constitutional engineering... I speak as a disenchanted African unitarist. I too used to stand for the unitary state and for centralisation and a powerful executive. But I regard three million lives as quite enough to make me reconsider the African condition. Maybe, sharing power with regional grassroots may save lives, as well as-enhance democracy. Who knows? Let us hope so!!"

It can be thus argued that the so called land clashes in Kenya were a violent expression of two issues: First, a tiny elite mobilised ethnically in a bid to remain in power at any cost. Second, ethnic mobilisation to create a rationale for the clashes was also possible because of a genuine fear among the KAMATUSA communities that political change will cost them 'everything' and the resulting marginalisation would be total. The land issue - land as ethnic living space - was integral to this mobilisation via the calls for majimbo.

 

6. The New Mitumba Generation

Kenya

Total Population in 1996: 29.1 million

Projected population in 2025: 63.4 million

% Urban 1995: 28%

%Urban Growth Rate (1995-2000): 5.6%

Source: The State of World Population, 1996, UNFPA

 

Rural Urban Gaps

Urban Population as % of Total

1960: 7

1990: 24

1993: 26*

2000: 32

Urban population annual growth rate(%)

1960-1990 7.7

1990-2000 7.0

Population of Nairobi in 1995: 2,079,000

Growth Rate 1970-75: 4.9

Growth Rate 1990-95: 6.3

Source: UNDP Human Development Report 1991

*Source: UNDP Human Development Report 1996

0. Overview

Kenya has changed considerably since the mid-1980s. The last major land related conflict in the country took place primarily in and around the Rift Valley where, as we have seen, the land issue has always been a sensitive one open to political manipulation. Today major violence continues in Kenya's Coast Province where 'upcountry people' and other 'outsiders' have been violently targetted by criminal gangs operating with an impunity similar to the one seen in the Rift Valley clashes. The age old grievances of ethnic groups indigenous to the Coast who have seen non-Coastal groups acquire most of the best land at the Coast over the past three decades, forms the crucial backdrop to this violence. However, especially after the 1992 elections when the on-the-ground effects of structural adjustment and economic liberalisation generally started to become really apparent, it is Kenya's urban areas that have seen much of the activity with regard to land that could have politically destabilising repercussions in the future. Weakened by both political and economic liberalisation, Kenya's ruling elite have literally ran out of patronage resources. In the days of a more controlled economy loyal KANU supporters were rewarded with import licenses, foreign exchange allocations, lucrative supply contracts by parastatals and the like. With these avenues increasingly closed by international donors who sometimes micro-manage economic policy, land, especially public and government land, has become a crucial patronage resource. Since the early 1990s land allocations - especially in cities and towns - have become a major way of rewarding government supporters. The phenomenon of land grabbing in cities like Nairobi has gathered momentum over the years to the extent that in 1996 a District Commissioner in Kerugoya town in Eastern Province complained publically that not a single acre of public land in the town had not been allocated to someone.

If the modern title deed was undermined in rural Kenya by the clashes that saw hundreds of thousands of smallholders evicted from their farms, then in the cities it has been undermined, espcially since the mid-1990s by double allocations of public land in cities and by landmark rulings by courts declaring allocations of land meant for public use to be illegal. At the same time Kenyans have become more organised in opposing land grabbing in the cities and several community organisations now exist fighting the practice. Since 1995 there have been countless incidents of parents physically opposing the allocation of land meant for school playing grounds to private developers, for example; organisaitons have been established to save Nairobi's parks; and, in 1996 and 1997 there have been violent confrontations between squatters in the capital city and people sent to evict them by developers. Some of these confrontations have resulted in deaths. In recent years Nairobi City Council authorities have also been involved in several confrontations with city hawkers over land the hawkers use to sell their wares. Every few months newspapers carry features about the latest move Nairobi hawkers have been forced to make by officialdom to make way for private developers. One of the directors of a prominent NGO working with youth in the slums of Nairobi told this author that the single greatest problem they now face is not financing but land grabbing. Land is being grabbed at such a rate that families are being relocated from one slum to the next; important playing fields for the children are disappearing quickly.

The weakening of the state since the early 1990s has seen it gradually lose control of its chaotic cities. In 1997 in Nairobi we have seen hawkers cram the sidewalks and refuse to leave when the authorities demand it; we have seen street children unite into large gangs and take the unprecedented step of actually fighting Nairobi City Council askaris on one occasion and matatu touts on another. In the meantime entire sections of the city have become no-go areas to the police; on major streets at the very heart of the city muggings take place in broad daylight; the list that chronicles Nairobi's decline is a long one. This phenomenon is not particular to Kenya.

"The situation varies from country to country. The state looks weaker in the countries that have seen changes in its higher echelons and where the old parties have been defeated (Congo, Mali, Niger). The state seems less weakend where old single parties have remained in power (Kenya, Togo, Mauritania). Despite the renewal of the political class and the change of leadership in some African countries - even if one-party regimes have disappeared and are being replaced by multi-party systems - African society is still a very long way from trusting the state. The democratic movements have even accelerated the loss of confidence, and weakened the state still further... Since colonization, the gulf separating state and society has not ceased to widen. Essentially, neither decolonization nor political pluralism has resolved the problem of democratisation and the redistribution of power in Africa. A reform of the structures of power will have to take into account the objective historical conditions in Africa and will have to base itself on the principle of devolution of responsibility to the grassroots communities and their institutions."

NGO workers in the slums of Mathare and Kayole that the author has spoken indicate that Nairobi's poorest and often most densely packed districts today are populated by a substantial proportion of mainly youth and their single mothers who form a rapidly growing underclass that cannot even be called urban peasants as many of the poor in Nairobi are sometimes described. This is an underclass that has no shamba back home in the rural areas to go back to; no piece of land where they can be buried when they die. In many cases the young men in this underclass have lived in Nairobi's slums for more than a generation and do not even know their grandparents, uncles, aunts and the like. They have no links to any 'family' in the conventional sense of word; their value system is radically different from the average Kenyan youth. Here we have to keep in mind that the very definition of Nairobi has been changing with every passing year. While the concentration of Nairobi's core population has grown, the city has spread outward to Ngong, Athi River, Karuri, Ongata Rongai and other such areas. Huge unplanned estates like Zimmerman on Thika Road have grown into entire districts. The circumstances of many in the city are now blatantly obvious from the 'street children' these days who are no longer so young. "Nairobi holds the dubious distinction of having one of the lowest school enrollment rates in the eh country. Although about 160,000 pupils are enrolled into about 182 City Council schools, this represents only about 63 percent of the school age children. This means about 100,000 school-age children in the Nairobi area are out of school. Social workers operating in the slums regard this figure as a conservative estimate."

"In a extensive survey of Mathare Valley carried out in 1970, David Etherton and a research team from the University of Nairobi's Housing Research and Development Unit (HRDU), found that 42% of the residents in Mathare squatter housing had lived in Nairobi for more than 20 years. In another survey covering 1,247 squatters outside Mathare and Dagoretti, Donna Haldane reported that only 27% owned land up-country outside Nairobi..."

"In the thirty years between 1960 and 1990, Africa's urban population has grown from 15 percent to 30 percent of the total population. By the year 2000, it will be close to 40 percent... The city is cruel. Its anonymity disconcerting, and it is difficult for people to adapt. Even the old traditions of solidarity and mutual support do not survive when confronted with money, power and force. The elderly are resigned to this state of affairs, but not the younger generation. Quite the contrary. Among these young people there is anger, a sense of hurt, and revolt. Their needs are greater than those of their parents due to the ostentation shown by those of their compatriots who have got rich quickly. The frustration of the young is aggravated by imaginations which feed on television, radio and cinema. young people dream of Paris, New York, London... Their acculturation to Western standards is selective: what they like best is the speed of the action, but also the images of quick money, violence and weapons... People in other parts of the world may have the same fantasies but they do not share the same reality..."

 

1. The New Mitumba Generation

In the author's opinion all the poorly implemented economic changes since the mid-1980s, poorly implemented because they were largely externally conceived and effected by the government with great reluctance and limited commitment, changed Kenyan society in ways that are now affecting our politics. Our urban middle class that had supported the move towards political pluralism had been thoroughly bewildered by the inflation and major corruption scandals of the early 1990s but stomached these unpleasant realities confident that political change would eventually correct things. The newfound freedom to criticize the government without fear also helped give off steam. The major economic liberalization in the 1990s (especially from 1993 onwards) allowed the middle class to explore new ways of surviving the inflation and mismanagement: the bad situation. Many teachers, engineers, lawyers, doctors and other educated Kenyans became traders, for example. Second hand clothes, second hand cars and cheap goodies from the East were evidence that everything could now be imported without having to pay 10 percent to the Foreign Exchange Allocation Committee. Kenya's enterprising middle class survived what by early 1993 must have seemed like the beginning of the end as everything became unaffordable; inflation approached 100 percent and economic collapse seemed a possibility. But it wasn't only trade and speech that became easier with the changes which allowed the middle class to survive.

The new air of freedom coupled with the need to survive created a whole new class. Middle class parents could not afford to educate their kids at the reputed private and national schools of the 1970s and early 1980s. So, Kenyans opened their own private schools; they started their own clinics, restaurants... In the new everyone-for-themselves era people did incredible things to survive. Even in the religion business, a new crop of second-hand preachers and bishops who had abandoned more mainstream churches created their own churches. The era of naked competition for our increasingly corrupt souls was upon Kenyans. By early 1997, the majority of posters on Nairobi walls advertised not entertainment or business events but 'gospel crusades'; some of them managed by 'bishops' in dark glasses, with fat bank accounts and surrounded by adoring groupies mesmerized by claims that these mitumba churchmen could 'cure', according to the brochure of one Nairobi church: "debt, pain, nightmares, insomnia, unemployment, illness, depression, drinking and drug problems, bad luck, curses, suicidal feelings, family conflict, broken relationships".

One can argue that this boom in a new level of survival, Jua Kali or mitumba mentality in business generally is still in progress and while it is the product of the changing structure of our society it is also causing changes in the same. This process has democratised and entrenched corruption because the only way someone gets a license to open a school in his residential house, a clinic down the road, with minimum resources is by paying someone off. The only way someone gets to build a rickety house is by bribing an official of the Planning Department to let them ignore city by-laws. There is now a whole class of Kenyans that would not be surviving if we were unable to bribe someone to cut vital corners. The Port of Kilindini in Mombasa is full of such people.

2. The Fruits of Multi-Party

As Kenya approaches the upcoming elections it has become clear that multi-partyism has not made a significant positive difference to the lives of Kenyans. In fact, combined with structural adjustment, it has made things worse, especially for the poor. Now these frustrations can be expressed, so people are emboldened. Multi-partyism and the politics of presidential succession - which multi-partyism has made a reasonable thing to contemplate because before presidents ruled until they were overthrown or died - has revealed splits in the ruling KANU elite that have finally demystified the African Big Man. Almost weekly now, Kenyans hear about or read about sometimes obscure KANU politicians saying incredibly hostile things to the president but he cannot do anything about them because he needs their votes in this era of competitive politics. Thus demystified, it is likely that the political temperature will rise substantially for the president in the run-up and immediately after to the forthcoming elections.

Land grabbing in the cities and the still festering situation vis-a-viz land in the Rift Valley continue to pose potential danger to Kenya. The situation in the Rift Valley appears to have settled down into an uneasy situation where local residents from all communities feel confident that this time around, there shall not be clashes associated with the elections. In the city of Nairobi, however different kinds of tensions are bubbling under the surface that could explode into anarchic violence among the growing underclass. Land grabbing in the city is only one of many causes of these kinds of tensions. The greatest danger remains that Kenyans will withdraw from the political process and literally give up on positive changes coming about as a result of the polls. This exhaustion with politics at a time when the problems is meant to solve are growing in scale is serious. Conceivably this could mean that the most dangerous time for Kenya will be in the two years following the 1997 elections.