Govt to support evicted Mau settlers

• About 1,500 families will be removed from their homes in the South Western Mau as efforts to rehabilitate the forest begin.

• The Special Programmes ministry will handle the support programme.

Settlers on a 19,000-hectare piece of the Mau Forest Complex will be the first to be ejected from Kenya’s main water tower.

Forestry and Wildlife minister Noah Wekesa said Tuesday that about 1,500 families will be removed from their homes in the South Western Mau as efforts to rehabilitate the forest begin.

The government said it will support the evictees for sometime as the transition occurs.

“Considerations will be given to students within the relocation area and who will be undertaking national examinations to continue unaffected. Livelihood support will be given to encroachers for at least one month,” said Mr Wekesa.

The Special Programmes ministry will handle the support programme but Mr Wekesa could not state exactly what form this would be in.

He said the Forestry ministry would keep an 'accurate and comprehensive’ register to facilitate the livelihood support programme for those to be moved out of the forest.

Although he repeated the promise that the removal of the settlers would be 'humane,’ he was cagey on the details of the process and when it would begin. Asked what would happen to those who would refuse to obey the order to leave, the minister said they would be 'persuaded’ to do so.

“The encroachers are from various districts and we can’t be sure where they are going to end up. It is up to them to state where they want to be relocated. A lot of them are good Kenyans and have started moving,” he said.

He spoke at a press conference in Nairobi a day after the expiry of a notice published on October 26 giving the settlers two weeks to leave the forest.

Those whose crops are ready for harvesting have been given time to do so while those whose crops are not ripe for the harvest will be required to move but may come back for their produce when it is ready.

The ministry will through its agencies, the Kenya Wildlife and the Kenya Forestry Service, be in charge of the relocation programme, whose first phase will take three weeks to implement.

Kenya Forestry Service director David Mbugua said the settlers targeted in the first phase had encroached on a 42-kilometre strip next to sections of the South West Mau that had been degazetted and converted into settlement schemes starting in the year 2001.

“Those ones have no documents to support their claims,” he said.

The government had then intended to settle people in nine schemes on a 35,000-hectare piece of the forest complex but some of these ended up encroaching into the 19,000 hectares now set to be recovered. 

He said 100 forest rangers had been deployed in the first 15-kilometre strip, 100 Administration Police officers were in the second part while another 100 rangers were manning the rest of the area.