Listening to the dissonant voices coming from Rift Valley politicians on the question of the Mau Complex, one discerns a perfunctory lackadaisical reaction to a highly important national issue. The conservation of the Mau is not a sectional issue or a mere inter-communal conflict over land and water. The Mau Complex is arguably the most significant water tower in East Africa. It is the source of the Mara River from whence the world famous Masai Mara National Game Reserve derives its name. The Mara River which straddles several game parks and reserves across two states supports the most extensive ecosystem in the region, supplying water and other vital resources, offering a lifeline to thousands of pastoralists downstream and draining into Lake Victoria. Mau is therefore as important to Kenya just as it is to Tanzania and Uganda. The annual wild beast migration cannot be without the Mau. Every player in the tourism industry knows that the regional circuit cannot be complete without the Masai Mara and it riverine ecosystem. Ravage the Mau, and you will have killed pastoralism, tourism, irrigation, horticulture, hydro-power generation, investment ad infintum. I witnessed firsthand the effects of destruction when I visited Makalia Water Falls in Lake Nakuru National Park in April. A lifeless dry ford has now replaced the resplendent leafy fall I had seen in June 2004.
Whereas William Ronkorua Ole Ntimama and his compatriots Nkoidila Ole Lankas and Gideon Ole Konchella argue that they want to protect the Mau to save the pastoralists from extinction, Isaac Arap Ruto, Benjamin Langat and Magerer Langat claim that the former are driven by the desire for “political” rather than environmental conservation. Though Ntimama and his colleagues may be the wrong persons, sending the right message at the right time, Ruto’s assertion is the logic of absurdity only fit for the political gutter. Ntimama’s war dance does little justice either to the cause he is advancing for “his people”, but perhaps Ruto and his associates have a better, fancier solution.
Conservation and sustainable development are the very essence of inter-generational equity; the desire for self preservation and perpetuation, espoused by every society with a strand, claim or pretension to modernity. When resources are abundant different communities and societies share them in peace. When they are scarce, communities skirmish or go to war over them. For centuries now, peoples, nations and nationalities have devised competing strategies of war, assembled large armies and fought wars to protect or enforce territorial claims over vital resources. Any modern society must have in place a system for self preservation and perpetuation. Strangling the pastoralist communities in the Mara downstream is akin to self administered genocide against a part of our society. I know of no other greater justification for war than an actual threat of historical obliteration against a community. Further destruction of the Mau might provoke an inter-communal conflict in South Rift which will make the internecine communal conflicts over livestock and pasture in Northern Kenya look like child play. This will be the ultimate cost of bad and myopic leadership.
Legal compensation is now being hoisted as the only basis for negotiating a safe “political” exit out of the Mau quagmire. Procedure is the handmaiden of justice. If the initial excision and entry into the Mau was illegal and un-procedural ab initio, why should eviction be legal and procedural? No political platitudes, legal shenanigans or adhesion to ghosts of archaic medieval norms on the sanctity of title can justify the prelude of a slow but inevitable environmental genocide by one community against another. The perceptible message coming from the Kalenjin leaders is, “lets us keep our peasants (voters [sic]) in the forest, destroy the Mau and win elections, the pastoralists can go to hell”. Such reckless political grandstanding can destroy an entire community.
The Mau must be protected at any cost for posterity. It does no matter who has to lose or win elections; all unwanted settlers must get out of the forest now. Only the fauna and flora are fit to live there!
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