Kenyans Fight for their Forests
10/26/98
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Title: Kenyans Fight for their Forests
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 10/26/98
Byline: George Mulala
Enviromentalists, students, opposition members of parliament and villagers
torched this construction site in Karura forest earlier this month. The
protest is over development and corruption that's leveling the forest.
N A I R O B I, Kenya, Oct. 26 - Environmental protesters cling to
trees, chant slogans and form human barricades, only to be dragged away by
riot police to allow the bulldozers through.
It is a familiar scene in Europe and North America, where green groups
frequently resort to "direct action" to keep the countryside from being
overrun by roads or office buildings. But this protest is in Africa, where
saving the planet is not seen as a top priority for people usually more
preoccupied with how to scrape together a daily living.
The object of their fury is the Karura forest on the northwest edge of the
Kenyan capital Nairobi, where developers have started to clear acres of
woodland to make way for an exclusive housing development.
Heightening the anger of protesters, an eclectic bunch of slum-dwellers,
environmental activists, opposition memebrs of parliament and wealthy
local residents, is what they say is corruption among top-level government
officials charged with protecting Kenya's forests.
In the century-long life of Nairobi, the forest, which once formed a semi-
circular belt around the northern edge, has been eaten away steadily to
make way for luxury homes, embassies and coffee plantations. Even the site
of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which has its
headquarters in the Kenyan capital, is built on land that was once forest.
It's a Long Story
"Land-grabbing goes back to colonial times," said Wangari Maathai, founder
of Kenya's Green Belt Movement. "The rich needed more land to build their
homes. They could have moved to the plains in the south but they preferred
to be on the higher ground, near the forest. So they began to cut it
down."
This mindset was inherited by African politicians after independence from
Britain in 1963, she added, accusing them of abandoning their
responsibility to protect public land in order to line their own pockets.
The 2,500 acre Karura forest is the latest in a series of forests across
Kenya to fall prey to developers. In Mount Kenya Forest the rare camphor
tree faces extinction, while along the Indian Ocean coastline the mangrove
is under constant threat.
Several indigenous trees including the towering muhugu, mukoi and mutuati
grow in Karura forest, which is home to Sykes monkeys, rare bush pigs,
tiny asunni antelopes and hundreds of bird species. The forest is held in
trust by the government on behalf of the Kenyan people and legally
speaking should be given away only if it is deemed to be in the "public
good."
Land Often Sold to Developers But activists say government ministers
habitually hand out public land to the politically well-connected, who
then sell it to developers. "The minister usually dishes out land to other
ministers, private secretaries, friends of the president and children of
the president. They normally sell it as soon as they get it," Maathai
said.
The route by which 200 acres of Karura forest ended up in the hands of
developers planning to build the multi-million dollar "Whispers Estate" is
unclear, although activists freely mention the names of top politicians
and presidential relatives they believe have profited along the way.
"There are highly placed individuals within the government who dish out
land at mind-boggling profits," said Paul Muite, leader of the opposition
Safina party. "It is the highest and worst form of corruption and it is
destroying the environment. I the next 10 or 20 years the country will be
turned into a desert."
Francis Lotodo, Kenya's minister for natural resources, was unavailable
for comment.
Protests Get Public's Attention A series of often violent demonstrations
in the heavily policed forest over the last month has drawn the attention
of the Kenyan media and the public to what is going on in Karura. The
issue regularly make front-page news and Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper
chartered a helicopter to take aerial photographs, which show that wide
tracts of forest the size of 30 soccer fields have already been cleared.
For now the chainsaws and bulldozers have been silenced after protesters
this month set fire to the contractor's site office, a truck, earthmovers
an other equipment, causing nearly $1.5 million worth of damage. But the
conservationists say their biggest success so far has been to mobilize
support from a wide cross-section of Kenyan society.
"The reason why people react so strongly is not necessarily because they
are good conservationists but because they are sick of a government that
is up to its teeth in corruption," Maathai said. "I want to take advantage
of this situation and attract people who might not have otherwise joined
an environmental movement."
Samuel Mwangi, a casual labourer who lives in Huruma slum on the edge of
Karura forest, is one such new recruit.
"We have been barred from entering the forest, there are police
everywhere," he said at a protest. "It belongs to all Kenyans but now it
is being divided up by politicians. What we know is that they are stealing
from us and we have to stop it."
Copyright 1998 Reuters