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KENYA: Forests Battle Lost, But War Goes
On
Copyright 2001 The Nation (Nairobi)
October 11, 2001
Opinion
When he learnt that an Eldoret court had last week dismissed an attempt to block the Government from delisting 167,000 hectares of the remaining forests, a colleague asked why lawyer Nixon Wafula had taken it upon himself to challenge the Government.
On reflection, I realised I did not have a ready answer. But it had me thinking. There are Kenyans, it dawned on me, who look beyond the food in front of them and wonder how to ensure the plate will still be there in the undetermined future.
They are said to be armed with an unusual natural weapon - the human disposition to constantly reflect on the future, what has been referred elsewhere as "broad space-time perspectives". These are the people the rest of us Kenyans do not really understand and regard with suspicion.
While most of us focus on the immediate future with a mixture of hope, despair and fear, such people reflect on such time-periods as the lifetimes of their children and look far into the violent wide world.
What is strange is that such people are not seers per se. They are ordinary mortals like Mr Wafula, or Prof Wangari Maathai, whose life history reads more like a chronology of arrests for standing up against the official destruction of our natural heritage.
This group also includes all those who have constituted themselves into the Kenya Forestry Working Group (KFWG) and the East Africa Wildlife Society to fight to sustain the country's biodiversity.
Singly and together, these people have filed different cases against the Government for making the infamous decision to hive off 12 of our forests. The decision appeared in the Kenya Gazette supplement of February 16 and resulted immediately in Kenya losing an environmental award in March from the International Nature Protection Group Action for Endangered Species.
At the height of the controversy, the Government never missed an opportunity to confuse those Kenyans who had resolved to oppose its action. Many are the times its functionaries deliberately misled Kenyans that they were not out to wipe out any standing forests but to settle squatters on land that had long ceased to be part of the forest estate.
This claim was repeatedly made by that time's Minister for Lands and Settlement, Mr Joseph Nyagah, and drummed up repeatedly by his colleague, Mr Francis Nyenze, then at Environment and Natural Resources.
But anti-excision campaigners were more sophisticated than that. Under the KFWG banner, the coalition found assistance from the Global Resource Information Department (Grid) of the United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep).
Using the latest satellite-imaging techniques, including the Global Positioning System and the Global Information System, Grid experts documented all the sites the Government intended to hive off.
What was most exasperating and makes me believe Kenya's leadership has institutionalised the art of lying was that nearly all the sites proposed for excision were actually covered by forest. Confronted with this piece of evidence, the Government did not have anything more to say than to advance the argument that the environmental lawyer, Mr Nixon Sifuna, had not followed the right legal procedure when he filed the anti-excision case.
Mr Sifuna demanded that the High Court in Eldoret impose a permanent injunction on destructive forays by the Government. Later, a different case was filed by quite a sizeable number of NGOs, including Prof Maathai's Green Belt Movement, the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Forest Action Network.
In this latter case, the appellants quoted extensively from the numerous laws the Government was hell-bent on breaking, the many international environmental conventions that bind the Government to good environmental conduct and the negative impact the delistings would make on the motherland.
The Ogiek community was not to be left out. Having seen that the community's livelihood was at stake, since much of it is based on exploiting non-timber products, the Ogiek Welfare Association filed a case asking the court to stop the Government from excising Eastern Mau Forest.
What everyone finds unacceptable is that, though these cases were filed in early May, none has ever been mentioned!
Mr Sifuna lost his case ostensibly on the grounds that he did not follow the right procedure in filing the proceedings. What we, laymen, find difficult to come to grips with is why the Eldoret court threw out the case on mere technical grounds.
The issue was too sensitive and touched on such fundamental and profound matters as the a country's very survival to have been bogged down by legal niceties which, to us laymen, are non-issues!
For instance, if the excisions were to go on as planned, Kenyans might end up repaying the $80 million the World Bank loan that was used to establish the forests. However, I am informed the law is not sensitive at all to such trivia.
Despite this temporary setback, all is not lost. For one, Mr Sifuna is at liberty to demand, from a higher court, a determination on merit. In addition, the NGOs and the Ogiek Welfare Association may need to see to it that their cases are brought before a judge for speedy determination.
But it will take everyone's vigilance to ensure the hackers of our collective destiny do not use the opportunity to carve up our forests for themselves.
It is the height of irony for the Kanu leadership to continue talking of handing over the mantle of leadership to the "youth" while, at the same time, working (and leading?) as if there will no tomorrow. The so-called dot-com politicians are either privy to this fact or irreversibly myopic. For none has ever raised even a finger against the systematic destruction of the basis on which life depends.
We expect them to realise that they might end up leading a shell of a country if much of the natural heritage is depleted. As they beg wananchi for a chance to prove themselves, let them say, loud and clear, to all those relics with anachronistic attitude to life in Kenya, that they are fed up with the systematic destruction of the country's forests!
What a good opportunity to prove their worth!
John Mbaria is a correspondent on environmental matters with The EastAfrican.
Email: jmbaria@nation.co.ke
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