Theatrics aside Ngilu and Swazuri, help reclaim plundered county land

Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu and National Land Commission chairman Muhammad Swazuri remind me of two characters in Nikolai Gogol’s timeless classic, The Government Inspector: Bobchinsky and Dobchinstky.

They have a talent for bobbing up in the choppy seas of land crisis like so much effluvium but rarely stay long enough to ensure successful resolution.

There is an ineffectiveness in their method, a lack of stick-to-itiveness, a knee-jerkism, a posing for pictures with teargassed children which does not create the reassurance in my mind that we have folks who are fully and calmly seized of the many crises confronting our dear land.

But we need Bob and Dob to bob up and down in the seas of the counties now where there has been a wanton and disgraceful plundering of public land, effectively rendering some county governments tenants and squatters in what should rightfully be their property.

I was particularly horrified at the experience of Meru County, where the local elite has been allocating public land to itself over the years, ending up with public toilets, police stations, roads, government offices, hospitals, public parks, and so on.

The county government is now against a wall: it needs the support of the national government to reclaim that land, but the latter is obviously not very interested in helping. In the meantime, the local elite are beating the drums of war and conspiring against the county government.

AFRAID OF CONTROVERSY

As it all unfolds, the people of Meru, especially the ones we thought were men and women of courage and principle are quiet, possibly afraid of being party to a land controversy.

One would have expected Bishop Lawi Imathiu,  Senator Kiraitu Murungi, Francis Muthaura, David Mwiraria and all those other big people, would call a meeting of leaders at which these fellows would be requested to hand back government offices, the DC’s compound and other public property which has been alienated.

The thing about devolution is that it is really up to you. If you want to raise your children in some filthy, dusty backwoods without infrastructure because you stole all the land, you could.

But if you are civilised and organised, you have been given the money and are empowered to plan and build a good place to live.

The point I am making is that local leaders as well as the high command at the Ministry of Lands should support this and all county governments to reclaim public land.

In the meantime, Governor Peter Munya — and all governors who have this land allocation problem — should form a commission of inquiry so that these landowners are given an opportunity to explain to their neighbours, and indeed, the whole world, how and why they were given public land.

Reports of such commissions and their recommendations would provide a roadmap for future land use in counties.

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I was saddened by a statement on social media by Mr Ezekiel Mutua, Information Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication, on the predicament of the TV stations switched off by his ministry.

I appreciate that Mr Mutua was not necessarily articulating government policy but expressing his private thoughts, but I think the Facebook posting captures the state of mind of senior government officials guiding public policy and providing advice to the President.

“There’s some hard truth that needs to begin sinking in — we may never again watch the Analogue 3 (or are they 4) TV stations as we knew them. Here’s why: the analogue TVs have not even begun to map the sites for setting up their digital infrastructure.

They cannot, therefore, be importing set-top boxes since such STBs must be aligned to the infrastructural setting and digital signals.

Whenever that begins it will take approximately Sh3 billion and about a year-and-a-half to be fully functional. By that time the market dynamics, especially advertising, will have shifted to alternative mediums and Kenyans will have realised they can live without the analogue 3. We are on day 12 since the self-imposed switch-off and nothing has happened!”

When enterprise loses the support of the government, it is time for prayers. Mobutu Sese Seko thought roads were bad things because they brought people together and created a conducive environment for conspiracies against him.

He didn’t build them. In the early 1980s we all remember the policies of breaking some tribes by destroying their businesses. Glorying in the death of enterprise comes from the same school — insecure and small people feed off the adulation of impoverished and broken people.

Fortunately, in a country where there are regular elections, we get the chance to sack an anti-people government.
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