There must be more to the killings in Tana Delta than meets the eye

Are the communities living in the Tana Delta region “mad”, as President Kibaki insinuated, or is there more to the killings taking place there?

Are the Orma, Wardei and Pokomo ethnic groups simply carrying out revenge attacks against each other or are there other forces at work that are condoning – if not actively encouraging – the bloodletting?

Is this just an agriculturalist-versus-pastoralist issue, as depicted by the media, or it is part of a larger scheme to permanently evacuate these communities from the region, as suggested by the region’s leaders and residents?

A study published by Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) in 2011 says that political and commercial interests may be fuelling the violence in the region.

Large tracts of land are being sold off or grabbed by various actors. These land deals are not only alienating pastoralist and agricultural communities from their ancestral land, they are also posing enormous environmental threats.

The LDPI study says that large tracts of land within the Tana Delta have been set aside for large-scale industrial farming and for mining by government and private agencies, as well as by foreign companies and governments.

Among the most prominent land deals is a public-private venture between a government authority and a local sugar company to convert about 40,000 hectares of the delta into a monoculture sugarcane plantation for biofuels.

Foreign firms and governments that are also said to be in the process of acquiring land in the Tana Delta region include a multinational company incorporated in Canada, which wishes to grow jatropha curcas, and a British company that wants to farm oil seed.

In 2008, it was revealed that the Emirate of Qatar had allegedly entered into a deal with the government to convert 40,000 hectares in the region for horticultural produce. In exchange, Qatar would lend Kenya $3.5 billion to build a deep water port in Lamu. It is not clear if this deal is still on.

These “land-grabs” reflect a trend internationally where rich food-insecure nations seek to acquire land in poor countries for food or biofuel production to boost their own supplies and to avert domestic instability.

African governments are only too eager to lease out public land because a lot of money can be made through such deals, not realising that these deals can cause political instability in their own countries.

The study argues that “large corporate land deals have the effect of reducing any chance of poor nations attaining food self-sufficiency” and that such land concessions are viewed by many as “government outsourcing food at the expense of their most food-insecure citizens”.

African governments claim that these land deals will boost local agricultural production, but evidence suggests that the produce is mostly intended for foreign markets and that large-scale commercial farming has, in many instances, impoverished local communities, and caused severe environmental damage.

The study warns that “while the delta provides immense environmental services to the country, developments that do not take the special circumstances of the delta into consideration may lead to the collapse of its services.”

Change of land-use has also impacted on livelihoods. Pastoralists pushed out of large land schemes have less pasture for grazing.

In the Tana Delta, a fragile and extremely important wetland system, the land-grabs may have aggravated tensions between the agriculturalist Pokomo and the pastoralist Orma and Wardei ethnic groups.

The LPDI study notes that the allocated land is trust land and any alteration to the land tenure ought to have occurred in consultation with the affected communities, as per the new Constitution.

However, most of the land deals have allegedly been sealed without consultations with the local communities. In fact, most are happening “outside public scrutiny and many details are still concealed”.

The new Constitution will, hopefully, make such deals more transparent and consultative in the future. In the meantime, the government must come clean on all the land deals it has entered into with local and foreign parties.

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