Monday, January 19, 2015

Children, teargas and land hunger.

Prosperity is not possible without capital; the foundation of capital is frequently land. "Prime" land in Kenya's Capital is scarce; the vanished open spaces in Nairobi's suburbs is proof. Not even public schools are spared, it seems. The imbroglio involving the Langata Road Primary School should not come as a surprise to the members of the Ndung'u Commission, whose report document the hundreds of thousands of acres of public lad that had been grabbed since 1963.

The world over, land is the basis for wealth creation. It s so in New York, London, Rio de Janeiro and it is true in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru and Kisumu. It is Kenya's Original Sin; the British settlers relied on a dubious application of English law to decide the fate of a territory to which they laid a dubious claim. The lessons learned from Imperial Britain have been applied with brutal ruthlessness for fifty one years. Going by the images of pupils suffering the predation-by-tear-gas of the National Police Service for exercising their right to assemble, picket and demonstrate under Article 37, it is clear that the next fifty one years will not differ much from the previous fifty one.

Land hunger is real. It is the basis for historical grievances. It is the basis for ethnic enmity. It is the basis for political instability. It is the basis for the radicalisation of a segment of Kenyan society. It has been a political problem since the swindle of the Million Acres Scheme. Successive regimes have failed to resolve the problem of land hunger; instead, cronyism, nepotism and corruption have defined the land policies of the government. It is the sunniest optimist who believes that the current land policy - if one exists - will surmount the difficulties of the past and settle, once and for all, the Land Question for posterity.

In the Twenty-first Century a war will be lost because of the paucity or the low quality of information available to the belligerents. In Kenya, there is a war over land, and the belligerents are the vested interests from the regimes of the past and the newly assertive peoples of this land who want a fair shake in the corridors of the government. In Kenya, one side is winning because it is asymmetrically better informed than the other side. Information on who owns what land and in what form is privileged information available to an elite few. This asymmetry handicaps those who would wish to contribute meaningfully to the resolution of the Land Question. Unless the information asymmetry is addressed, Kenya's Land Hunger will morph into a Land Starvation he effects of which could very well be catastrophic to economic investment and political comity among ethnic communities.

In an information-starved bureaucratic environment, it is the corrupt who have the power. The corrupt will never exercise this power for the public good. They will do so for selfish ends. Because they now that their days at the trough are finite, they will seek to camouflage their identities; they will hide behind corporate identities (whose records will permanently be unavailable to the curious) and they will employ nominees bound by rules of privilege such as lawyers. Their tentacles will spread to the makers of policies and the enforcers of government diktats. Their hearts will harden against the weak and marginalised; in order to secure their ill-gotten gains, they will not hesitate to unleash police, police dogs and teargas on children and reporters.

Kenya's choices regarding land are not stark; the Constitution makes them plain as day. It is the will of our representatives that is lacking. Where there is a will, there is a way. Our will as a sovereign people is being tested today. Whether we impose it on our government will determine whether in a decade we can count the teargassing of children as the straw that finally broke the camel's back and initiated the proper reforms needed to quieten the cries of the perpetually land hungry.

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