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Kimunya: Internally displaced
opportunists
By Dauti Kahura
Standard
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Lands and Housing minister Amos
Kimunya does not have very good news for those displaced by ethnic
clashes.
"The Government does not have
any land to give," the minister said categorically. "We
have no land for re-distribution".
The government’s duty, said
Kimunya, is to facilitate proper utilisation of land through
workable policies and issuing of legal documents pertaining to
adjudication.
In a wide-ranging interview on land
re-distribution, internally displaced people and the escalating
squatter problem, the minister said that "not every Kenyan
will get land because Kenya does not have enough land for
all".
"This whole matter of
internally displaced persons should be de-politicised,"
Kimunya says.
Without naming names, the minister
accused some MPs of dragging politics into resettlement issues for
their own selfish ends.
"If we want to get to the root
of this problem we must begin by having an operational definition
of an internally displaced person," he adds.
Internally displaced people, whose
number the minister says he does not know, are largely latter-day
victims of the infamous ethnic clashes that rocked the expansive
Rift Valley Province in the early 1990s.
In Kimunya’s view, there are
three categories of people who were affected by the tragic
skirmishes:
• Landowners who had title deeds,
or persons who were about own land and therefore can lay legal
claims to it.
• People who leased land (and
therefore had land rights by virtue of tilling the land) with
prior arrangements with the landowners.
•Squatters who had certain
arrangements with the local leaders.
The last two, according to the
minister, occupied land by virtue of private arrangement with
landowners – on government forest land, trust land and abandoned
plots.
And that is where the twin problems
of who should lay claim to re-settlement and land ownership
fundamentally lies.
"There are landowners who sold
land in distress and/or also fled the clashes and abandoned their
land," says Kimunya. If there are any legal claims to any
land, it is by the landowners.
"Landowners should get
preference in land reclamation," he says.
Some 225 families from Moi Ndabi in
Naivasha, which had sold their land "under distress"
have settled back into their former lands, the minister says.
In the minister’s view, the
so-called internally displaced persons should be regarded as
"normal landless people".
"You cannot squat or rent land
from a landowner and still lay claim to that land. The purported
internally displaced people are just poverty stricken and landless
people looking for an opportunity to get free land," reckons
Kimunya.
In any case, says the minister,
many of the people claiming to be internally displaced are "masquerades
and opportunists".
As far as Kimunya is concerned,
these are squatters and not displaced people.
"Take for example the people
who were put on trucks from Maela and dispatched to different
places. These were not original internally displaced people."
These people who used to rent land
in the Enoosupukia catchment area and lived at the trading centre,
he said.
Genuine people who were displaced
by the clashes in Enoosupukia, for instance, were screened in
Maela and resettled through a UN assistance programme in 1999 and
2000. Other internally displaced persons have been re-settled in
Hombe in South Nyanza, Gathioro and parts of Mt Kenya.
"The actual numbers of
internally displaced people in Kenya is not quite known,"
says Kimunya. "But I can tell you that the number cannot be
more than 10,000."
The minister points out "there
are several non-government organisations that have been floating
(to the public and their donors) very exaggerated numbers and we
know why."
Their numbers range between 350,000
and 600,000 people.
He emphasises that 600,000 are the
people who were affected by the clashes and not the number of the
internally displaced persons.
"How can we have over half a
million displaced people?" he posed.
"All the people – about 90
per cent – who claim to be displaced should be currently settled
somewhere, doing whatever they were doing before".
Does the government nevertheless
have any mechanisms or policies to settle landless Kenyans?
"Squatters are being
re-settled through the normal channels — just like it has been
happening through the years since independence.
"Once the government finds an
unused and unoccupied piece of land, it will settle genuine
squatters."
Another way of addressing the issue
is through a Truth, (Justice) and Reconciliation Commission, but
progress on its formation seems to hit a rough patch.
"My ministry," said
Kimunya, "the Office of the President (OP) and the Justice
and Constitutional Affairs Ministry have been tasked to come up
with a committee that will look into the controversial issue
internally displaced people."
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