Posted Thursday, December 29, 2011 | By MUTUMA MATHIU
The first existential test for New Kenya will come, not from the Rift Valley and its addiction to bloodletting, but from the Coast and its fondness for secession.
How the Coast issue is navigated over the next couple of years will determine whether Kenya marches forward as the serious country it has the potential to be, or slides into a smoking network of warring Bantustans.
The Coast has a history slightly more complicated than the rest of the country. The 10-mile strip was property of the Sultan of Zanzibar until 1895 when it became a British protectorate, administered on behalf of the Sultan.
In 1963, sovereignty for the strip was transferred to Kenya under a memorandum of understanding signed by the Sultan and Jomo Kenyatta.
There were conditions attached to that transfer, chief among them respect for religion and land titles.
Secessionists claim that under the memorandum, the Coast was granted the right to vote in a referendum whether it wished to remain a part of Kenya, or go its own way in 2013. I have seen some of the components of that memorandum, but no reference to a referendum.
The Mombasa Republican Council has emerged as the container of the grievances of the Coast and a movement to challenge the existence of Kenya.
The group, which is illegal, argues that Pwani si Kenya and has been recruiting extensively across the province and fanning the flames for the creation of an independent coastal nation, along the lines of Southern Sudan, Eritrea and Somaliland.
To justify its rather drastic proposal, I think there has been an argument that the Coast was never actually properly a part of Kenya.
Which is total nonsense, of course, and is the kind of argument which can be made by almost any scrap of Africa, thrown together by colonialists during the scramble.
I think it is more accurate to say that there have always been centrifugal forces, notably among the traditional slave-keeping overlord classes who in old times owned and traded in the Miji Kenda.
But today, it is among the Miji Kenda that the protest voices are loudest. While I will never advocate the dismembering of Kenya, the grievances of the MRC and other pseudo-secessionists are real: the poorest counties are at the Coast.
Then there is the land conundrum. This started with the British at the turn of the last century. The Land Title Ordinance of 1908 declared all land which was not under cultivation to be Crown property. Another 1915 law stripped Africans of land ownership, turning them into tenants of the State.
After independence, the dispossession of locals continued. Today, there probably isn’t a one-eyed idiot who served in the top echelons of the Kenyatta and Moi governments and does not have endless acres of first-row beach property.
In settlement schemes in Kwale, Kilifi and Lamu, upcountry people probably got more land than the locals. There are some families in this country with title to 80,000 hectares.
In my travels at the coast, I have on numerous occasions, been offered land. Usually, it would be their sole property, their only means of sustenance. They have huge tracts of “clan land” elsewhere, I would be told.
They get very little from the land and they are selling it to go start a business, they say.
I have on every occasion politely declined because I know there is no clan land and many who sell their land do not start any businesses. They squander the proceeds on good living, and then build shacks on roadsides.
Families in Coast are very poor, but unlike in other poor communities, many Coast children do not go to school. This means that the current hopelessness will continue into the future.
I think Coast has a serious leadership deficit. Because of that, the problems of the region will not be resolved, even if Seyyid Said is resurrected and given a new crown.
I also know that the suffering at the Coast is caused and compounded by the kleptocracy and mismanagement of the State by the maggot elite both regionally and nationally.
I also suspect that parts of that elite may be fanning the fires of secession.
Devolution was intended to bring hope and development to marginal communities.
However, it will take very good leadership — the sort we don’t seem to have — to sort this one out.
mmathiu@ke.nationmedia.com
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