Thursday, December 29, 2011

Coast’s Hordes of Shrewd ‘Squatt ers’


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  Last week I outlined the genesis of the coastal land problem, and how the coast’s unique history of having been governed by the Sultan of Zanzibar in the pre-colonial era, led to complexities of land ownership which do not exist elsewhere in Kenya.
Seemingly unoccupied stretches of land could as easily be the legitimate property of an absentee Arab landlord, whose family had owned that land for over a century; or it could be government land; or it could belong to some local villagers who had moved away temporarily to farm some other parcel of land they owned, but had every intention of returning to their ‘ancestral land’.
I also explained that in the Moi era, receiving an allocation of prime coastal land – whether in the peri-urban, semi-industrial zones around a major town, or a piece of beachfront property – was the ultimate proof of having ‘arrived’, politically speaking.
As a result, in the coast more than anywhere else in the country, it was common to find that some clan which had long settled in some village, were – in the purely technical sense – actually squatters on land owned either by absentee Asian or Arab landlords or a top government official who had received it as an allotment.
In the early years of such government allotments, it was relatively easy to handle this problem, especially if what you were dealing with were residents of a fishing village to whom the beachfront you coveted for your new holiday resort, was just a fish landing point. You either asked the provincial administration to find them alternative land; or you bought them some other land yourself; and in either case, you also paid them some compensation, and they willingly moved away.
But in time, this led to the evolution of “professional squatters”: hordes of rural poor who, once made aware that there was some lucrative property transaction about to take place near where they lived, promptly moved there; built rudimentary dwellings overnight; and promptly declared that this was their “ancestral land” which they would willingly die to defend.
Such a declaration was – in essence – a tough negotiating posture meant to drive up the price of the eventual bargain that would see them leave the ‘disputed parcel of land’ to the developer.
And I well remember one story of a foreign investor who had just paid of a small village to leave the beach property he had acquired, moving with great caution to relocate what he had been assured was the village graveyard “containing the bones of our ancestors” as one old man had told him. Only to find that what had been buried in this ancestral graveyard was nothing but suspiciously fresh banana stems, buried strategically to drive up the final compensation for the shrewd ‘professional squatters’ whom he had just paid to leave.
The tragedy is that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between those squatters who are actually innocent villagers about to be driven out of the place where they have lived for decades; and so-called squatters, who are actually just shrewd and militant operatives who know that a developer who wants to put up a Sh500 million beach hotel, will find it only prudent to spend about Sh5 million to appease these ‘squatters’ rather than spend years fighting to assert his property rights through the courts.
So here is an issue worth pondering: After 2012, it will not be senior government officers like the current Coast Provincial Commissioner, Ernest Munyi, who will occasionally be called on to effect High Court orders on evictions and demolitions. It will be popularly-elected governors.
So what happens when some airport expansion or port expansion project, requires the relocation of large numbers of voters from their current homes?
Or if some absentee landlord with a valid title deed turns up, and wants to evict the inhabitants of some small village or informal settlement, as a preliminary to developing his parcel of land?
A comparison can be made with the Embakasi MP, Ferdinand Waititu, who has been seen on TV, personally throwing stones at “land grabbers”. It has been alleged that some of these so-called 'grabbers' were in reality legal owners of a parcel of land which had been occupied and turned into an informal settlement; and as such, this privately-owned land was densely packed with prospective voters.
Mr Waititu now wants to be the governor of Nairobi: if he were elected governor, would he ever consider presiding over government demolitions of the kind we have recently seen take place in Syokimau?

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