Money, usually too tight to mention in the dusty central Kenyan town of Nanyuki, flowed freely this week as cattle herders finally came into British compensation for half a century of deaths and
injuries on local live-fire ranges.
Payouts ranging from $10 000 to almost $240 000 arrived on Monday at a bank in Nanyuki, about 200 kilometres north of Nairobi, attracting long queues of Samburu herdsmen, among the poorest people in a country where about half the population lives on less than a dollar a day.
The Daily Nation newspaper splashed the story on its front page on Wednesday, under the headline ”From Herdsmen to Instant Millionaires.”
A witness who only gave his name as Mathenge said from
Nanyuki: ”Samburu tribesmen and their families are here on a spending spree: drinking, roasting meat, buying bicycles, clothes, flirting with women.”
Some 288 people benefitted from the $4,5-million payout, settled out of court after a British law firm took up the Kenyans’ cause.
Mathenge said a variety of conmen, masquerading as traders, doctors, preachers, fortune-tellers, soothsayers and vets, descended on Nanyuki moments after news spread that the money had arrived, hawking dubious wares to Nanyuki’s new big spenders.
”They bought ordinary water as bottled mineral water, fake mobile phones, veterinary medicine and other counterfeit goods,” Mathenge said.
”Others said they would buy vehicles and build permanent houses.”
Late on Monday, dozens of taxis snaked to the remote ends of Samburu, a semi-arid area with minimal public transport facilities, to take the new millionaires home, he said.
Britain agreed to the payout in July, after admitting
”limited liability” over a 50-year period during which British forces, among others, conducted live-fire exercises on land used for grazing in the Nanyuki area.
”People … have been blinded, have lost limbs and have suffered the most appalling internal injuries by these bombs. They have had the most miserable of existences since their accidents,” the claimants’ British lawyer, Martyn Day, said at the time. – Sapa-AFP