How land deals of the early 1960s came to haunt the country during poll chaos

• WB gave loan to new government to buy land from settlers who feared to stay on

A report by J.H. Lategan and sent to the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Lands and Settlement, Mr N.S.Carey Jones, now sheds light into what went wrong in the initial stages of the Yeomen experiment which was to be rolled out countrywide.

The Lategan Report blames white farmers’ selfishness and drunkenness and elitist behaviour of the new African farmers.

He wrote: “The European farmers, for purely selfish reasons, were anxious for this scheme to succeed when it was initiated, their idea being that if this scheme succeeds they would be in a favourable position to get rid of their own farms at good prices to the settlement board.”

The report continued: “Yeomen farmers consider themselves to be gentlemen who are above the menial tasks of farming and they spend most of their time in the bars of Nakuru, the work being left to the women and labourers.”

The Yeomen Scheme was highly subsidized by the colonial government as a direct reward to those who had supported the colonial structure. While all the labourers had been supplied and paid for by the government, Mr Lategan, the investigator, found only one farmer at the Bahati farm. Besides drunkenness of the farmers, they also did not have extension officers and relied on neighbouring European farmers for advice.

“Some of them still appear to try peasant farming, which means that they plant crops, such as beans in between the rows of maize,” said the report. The failure of the Yeomen scheme meant that the government was forced to revise its policy.

It was agreed with both the British government and World Bank that land would be transferred through normal sales in open market to new owners or cooperative societies.

The norm

It was this last effort that became the norm shortly after Independence and which the government of Jomo Kenyatta flagged on enthusiastically.

The Yeomen Scheme only lasted until 1961, when it was re-named Assisted Farmers scheme. While the government, with funding from World Bank and British government, started buying for these Assisted Farmers, what slowly emerged was a new crop of big land owners—amidst general landlessness and poverty.