/ 17 June 2005

Kenya evicts thousands living in forest land

Kenya is evicting thousands of families who illegally occupy a vast swathe of forest in the country’s Rift Valley region, government spokesperson Alfred Mutua said on Friday.

Mutua said the government would not backtrack on its decision to forcibly evict thousands of families from the Mau Forest, a vast swathe of indigenous woodland in the central Rift Valley region, west of capital city Nairobi.

”We are not going to allow people to live in forests,” Mutua said, adding that: ”These forest areas are water catchment areas and the waters from these areas not only feed our country but [also] … trickle through the Maasai Mara [national reserve] to our neighbours”.

”Right now we are saying let’s plant trees. We can’t allow people to live on what little forested land we have,” Mutua added, saying forests currently represent just 2% of the country’s total surface.

”We are going to go down to one percent if we are not careful and then we get sporadic rains, weather patterns change and more deserts creeping into Kenya,” he said.

Security forces are continuing to forcibly evict people living in the Mau forest, destroying their villages’ schools. Maasai tribesmen, the people most affected by the evictions, demonstrated briefly on Thursday near the forest.

Mutua declined to say how many people were being evicted, but local leaders believe the number is a high as 50 000, most of whom were illegally allocated land during the 24-year regime of former President Daniel arap Moi, who retired in 2002.

Much of Kenya’s land surface is affected by desertification and about 10-million of the country’s 32-million people live in poverty in areas classified as arid or semi-arid, according to official figures.

Environmentalists have long argued that further deforestation can only worsen the problem of recurring droughts and frequent food shortages, particularly in the arid and semi-arid areas.

During his last decade in power, Moi authorised the cutting down of thousands of hectares of forest land, causing complaints from environmentalists. -Sapa-AFP