More than 100 families miss out on allocations

Jane Wanjiru is a minor celebrity in the colonial village of Iruri at the foot of Mount Kenya in Nyeri East district. She was one of the two nonagenarians who were photographed speaking to First Lady Lucy Kibaki in 2007.

It is their talk with the First Lady that bore the directive she gave to the ministry of Lands to buy land for squatters living in the colonial reserve.

Moved by their plight, Mrs Kibaki promised to settle the villagers, kicking off a plan that led to the purchase of a section of Solio ranch for the establishment of a settlement scheme.

But today, Ms Wanjiru is still in her tin-roof shack, although the Kenyan Government has invested Sh1.275 billion in a settlement scheme from which she would have benefited.

Ms Wanjiru is among the more than 100 families that missed out on the allocations. Weak and sickly, Ms Wanjiru lives in misery in her shack. Yet the land she should have got was allegedly allocated to civil servants and MPs and their allies.

Left out

The Iruri villagers say the First Lady expressly promised to settle them but they were left out. “Life here is very hard. We do not have enough food, we cannot work on the farms or build any structures because this is not our land,” said Joyce Wambui Macharia, a 73-year-old squatter.

The history of Iruri village goes back to the colonial era when the British herded thousands of people in Central Kenya into “land reserves” after white settlers took the arable land.

The displacement was fast-tracked when the Mau Mau war of liberation broke out. To cut off supplies to the Mau Mau fighters, villagers were pushed into settlement schemes around which trenches were dug.

The idea was to resettle them after independence, but residents of many colonial villages are still waiting, 46 years on. In areas such as Iruri and the neighbouring Kiamariga, life is grim. “I was born here and I have never known any other home,” said Mwangi Muchori, 50.

“We have no land to till and our hopes were raised when we were told by the chief and sub-chief that we would be resettled. Now everybody is in despair.”

Another villager, 46-year-old John Mbogo, said the tiny village graveyard is full and they are forced to excavate old graves to bury the dead.

The villagers live on tiny plots about half the size of a penalty box in a football pitch. They primarily depend on relief food.

“We want Mama Lucy (Kibaki) to know that she promised us land and we did not get it,” said Martha Wangu, a mother of nine, who talked of the indignity of mothers living with their grown-up sons in their houses, due to lack of space.

First phase

But Central PC Japhter Rugut said the Iruri villagers had not been evicted from forests and did not qualify to be settled in the first phase of the programme.

“It is true they made the appeal to the First Lady. However, I later clarified to State House that there are more than 20,000 people in various colonial villages in Nyeri.

“If we settled those at Iruri in Solio, how would we explain to the rest why they were left out? It was agreed that the colonial villages issue would be dealt with in the second phase of resettlement,” he said.