Land hunger eats into Kenya’s fragile forest

The leaves on the tea bushes in the plantations of the Kenyan region of ­Kericho are a sickly shade of green. In the small town of Narok, the river has become toe-deep, a giant puddle that residents use as a communal car wash. Sun-beaten rhinoceroses loaf across Nakuru national park, their ribs jutting out from thinning bodies.

All three – cash crops, ­rivers and wildlife– are crucial to Kenya’s long-term viability. But they are being starved of moisture because of the degradation of the Mau forest that serves as the drainage basin at the country’s ecological heart.

Its destruction by subsistence farmers is creating the kind of threat to development – slow-burning but potentially catastrophic – that Kenya’s coalition government was formed to tackle after the country’s violent post-election crisis last year.

“If Mau goes, the consequences are too severe to contemplate,” says a government economist. “The very existence of Kenya in the long-term depends on getting the Mau back.”

But just as the problems of the Mau were caused by the corrupt and tribalised politics of the early and mid-1990s, their resolution today is being impeded by the shortcomings of power-sharing.

The forest was once a 400,000 hectare thicket of trees spread across the rolling hills of the southern Rift Valley, which captured rain water and funnelled it via aquifers into 12 rivers and five big lakes.

But since the early 1990s nearly 30 per cent of it has been destroyed, according to the United Nations, by approximately 40,000 settlers who have cleared the cedar trees to make way for farm plots on which they grow wheat, cabbages and tomatoes.

The result is reduced rain capture and weaker river-flow downstream – effects compounded by droughts linked to global warming – and that has direct consequences for two pillars of Kenya’s economy.

Without water, tea producers in Kericho such as Finlays and Unilever cannot stay in business in the country, and if the savannah dries up so will the numbers of wildlife tourists who fly to Kenya in their hundreds of thousands each year.

Even more dangerous, in a country where, the UN World Food Programme says, 3.5m people this year are already facing imminent hunger, is the prospect of water and food supplies in the big cities dropping to critically low levels.

At first glance the Mau looks like an example of a recurring African conflict: slash-and-burn farming threatens ecosystems all over the continent as the immediate needs of individual survival tend to trump the long-term interests of societies.

But experts who know the Mau say the root cause of the problem is not poverty. It is the greed and impunity of politicians hungry for money and votes.

The destruction of the Mau started in the 1990s under Daniel arap Moi, the president of the time, when officials in cahoots with politicians began illegally to excise chunks of the forest and kept them for themselves or sold plots to peasants to expand the empire of Mr Moi’s Kalenjin tribe.

Moses Limo, the mayor of Kericho, says: “We cannot say there is not a law that governs all this. There is. But laxity and a lack of political will have really killed this country.”

Raila Odinga, the prime minister, has tried to push Mau on to the political agenda, commissioning an as yet unpublished report from a taskforce he asked to examine the incendiary issues of resettling and compensating the settlers.

But action is being impeded by the fact that Mwai Kibaki, the president, has ceded him little real power in Kenya’s coalition government. A bigger obstacle is that Rift Valley politicians, even though they are on the same side of the coalition, have turned the issue into a tribal dispute between their communities.

Nicholas Ole Murero, a Masai and former chairman of Narok council, says the forest belongs to his tribe. “We get our herbs from there. We do our ceremonies there. We slaughter cows there. It was where we ran to hide from our enemies. But now our enemies are in the forest.”

The river Mara south of Narok has become so dry that some Masai are bringing their cattle to town to find them water. If the ­government does not evict the Kalenjin settlers, Mr Murero says “the young people are saying they will evict them themselves”.

High in the hills of the former forest, the settlers in one makeshift Kalenjin settlement are acutely aware of what they are being blamed for.

Narok council tried to evict them in 2005, a move blocked by a court injunction, but the prime minister’s taskforce has renewed their fear and indignation.

Joseph Bosek, a community spokesman, waves the title deed for his own plot and says: “We have a right to be here because we did not break any law. We bought this forest. It is ours.”

Many such deeds were falsified during the 1990s. But the Kalenjin politicians responsible are trying to suppress the issue and blame the Masai. For many of the poorly educated settlers, the scheme in which they were pawns is too elaborate to comprehend.

“The question we have for the government,” says Mr Bosek, “is why did they give the go-ahead for selling this land if it was not proper?”

The answer is that Kenya’s elite were focused on short-term calculations of political expediency and did not see the coming environmental catastrophe that now threatens to dry the life out of their country.