ELDORET North MP William Ruto yesterday fought off claims that he forcefully acquired a 100-acre farm in the Rift Valley after the post-election violence in 2008. Ruto claimed there was a “grand scheme” to link him to the 2008 post election violence by claiming he evicted the owner Adrian Muteshi and his six workers from a farm in Kaptabei Scheme, Uasin Gishu county.
Ruto and Muteshi have been in court over the ownership of the farm which the Eldoret North MP says he bought from Dorothy Yator. He offered to return the farm to Muteshi who insisted on compensation which Ruto refused to give. After they failed to agree an out of court settlement, High Court Judge Rose Ougo ruled that the case should proceed for hearing.
Yesterday Ruto called a press conference to “give his side of the story” and accused Muteshi of “malicious claims." “Muteshi must be honest. Allegations that he was at the farm in 2008 is actually a fraud. I've been the area MP for 15 years and nobody lived on that farm. The last time somebody was seen on the farm was in 1992. Muteshi was not living in the farm in 2008,” he said.
In his court case, Muteshi says he bought the farm in 1989 but was forced to flee after the disputed December 2007 election. Ruto accused Muteshi of making up the 2008 date to tie him to the post election violence and challenged him to lodge a formal complaint to the authorities on who evicted him and when. “Muteshi has claimed that I evicted him from the land with the purpose of acquiring it. He alleges that I am either responsible or caused his eviction from his property. The smells of a scheme and machinations,” Ruto said during the press conference.
Describing himself as an innocent buyer of the land, Ruto said he has written to the Criminal Investigation Department and the Director of Public Prosecutions to find out who was responsible for the eviction. “Those responsible for this eviction, including myself, should be prosecuted if found to have anything to do with it,” he said.
The MP said he bought the land, which he estimates to be 86 acres, in September 2008 from Dorothy Jemutai Yator of ID No 12830496 in a transaction conducted by Elizabeth C. Rotich Advocates of Eldoret. “I did due diligence before the acquisition. All the records indicated that the land belonged to the person in question and I hand no reason to doubt the documents because they were from the Ministry of Lands,” he said. Ruto said he had decided to give up the farm after the Lands ministry disowned the title deed as fraudulent in March 2011.
According to the ministry, the files of the plot Uasin Gishu/Tapsaagoi/33 contain all the background information on how the land was allocated to Adrian Gilbert Muteshi but do not make any reference to Dorothy Jemutai Yator. The ministry further said the transfer letter from the Land district registry, which was used as authority to issue a title to Yator, did not originate from the Director of Land Adjudication and Settlement office. “It is then that I advised my lawyers to surrender the land back to Muteshi and we pursue Dorothy instead." said Ruto.
According to the documents Ruto presented to the media yesterday, Dorothy acquired the land in 1980 but a transfer of land in the settlement scheme was only registered in her name on August 20, 2007. Ruto said he did not know where Dorothy Yator was now, and he could not explain to journalists why he bought the land just after the mass evictions in the Rift Valley.
He said that Yator's husband was an employee of the Lands ministry but he did not know where exactly he worked. Dorothy's ID number suggests that she acquired it in 1991 or 1992 when she reached 18 years of age. This would have made her seven years old in 1980 when she bought the land. Asked if he knew Dorothy's age and whether he could have bought land from a minor, Ruto said it was not his business to know other people's age.
When challenged to explain why he had decided to address the media while the matter is pending in court, Ruto said he had come to clear the air. “A lie told many times becomes the truth. What is known out there is that Muteshi was evicted from his farm by William Ruto. I have come to set the record straight,” he said.
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