Ruto, Kalenjin And The Land Question

Ruto, Kalenjin And The Land Question

JOHN ONYANDO

October 10, 2015

     

After years of ill ease over the country’s existential land question, land matters are back to newspaper headlines. Just this week, Coast MPs declared their unambiguous opposition to the proposed changes to land laws that would effectively cripple the National Land Commission. Civil society, led stoically by the land commission, has voiced alarm at the new laws. In Kajiado, Maasai youths asserting their voice over land matters have staged big protests in the last month.

But despite this seeming effervescence over land, the other two regions with historical grievances, Central and Kalenjin, are distinctly calm. The last time the regions’ land grievances came to national limelight was in 2008 post-election violence. Hundreds of people were killed on both sides, and it was that violence that jolted Kenya to rewrite the constitution, and among other reforms enact a permanent land commission. That crisis also invited the intervention of the International Criminal Court, whose cases against Uhuru Kenyatta, the scion of Kenya’s landed elite, and William Ruto, who supposedly embodied Kalenjin land grievances, stirred the politics.

In the drive to beat the ICC cases was born the Jubilee alliance. An improbable union, Jubilee not only ensured the self-preservation of the two tribal champions; it met their ordinary followers’ hopes for peace, an end to stigmatisation over the violence the two communities meted out on each other and on other Kenyans, and of course a credible stab at the Presidency by the two leaders – against a seemingly unstoppable Raila Odinga.

Riding on state machinery and the most blatant undermining of national institutions, the alliance paid off. And for a temporary period it seemed that Kikuyus and Kalenjins had made peace with their land issues. The Kikuyus have historical bargain –while many lost land in Central Kenya, they got even more outside. Key beneficiaries of this bargain are of course the landed elite, but ordinary Kikuyus in the diaspora also link their fortunes to the community’s hold of the Presidency, a rickety state whose shortcomings many progressive Kikuyus have written about.

But the return of the land question demonstrates a different sort of comfort among the Kalenjins, whose leaders are missing from the debate. While Bomet governor Isaac Ruto has disapproved of the proposed laws, the rest of the URP brigade takes instructions from the Deputy President, who is obliged to support government legislations irrespective of their logic.

The amendments come at a time when the DP Ruto is beleaguered on all fronts. His case at the ICC has been strengthening, leading his supporters to question the sincerity of the government’s efforts to help him. Locally, his office has no effective power, making it weaker than previous Vice Presidencies that exercised executive authority. His chief of staff and three Cabinet Secretaries have been suspended for nearly a year for corruption, while others facing similar queries sit pretty.

Now the peace the ordinary Kalenjin folk made over the land issue is being provoked by laws that aim to give the President’s appointees power over every land transaction. Even more important, the new laws would give legal protections to all land transactions that took place before their enactment, according to the land commission chairman Muhammad Swazuri. In other words, the laws aim to take Kenya back to the Jomo Kenyatta years. Even President Moi relaxed some powers over land he inherited from Kenyatta, such as on allocation of beach plots.

There is direct connection between Ruto’s current problems and the revival of anti-Raila rallies in the Rift Valley. For over five years, Raila has been Ruto’s bogeyman. Attacking the former Prime Minister also gels Jubilee, which Ruto must need to atone for the failed attempts by Kalenjin MPs to impeach Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru.

That Raila is still used as a scarecrow long after Uhuruto took power demonstrates not only Raila’s potency as the robust counterweight to Jubilee, but also the failures of the regime. Jubilee has inflicted a level of polarisation on our politics where loyalty to the President trumps an MP’s reflection of his constituents’ needs. In Jubilee logic, whatever is proposed by Uhuru must be good to the Kalenjin, even if it is something Kalenjins have fought wars against.

There’s also the question of Ruto’s cult-based politics, which is sustained by hefty bribes to his political allies. While no one can doubt Ruto’s energetic organising capacities, I have not heard of a single bright idea Ruto ever introduced in our politics. His clout in Kalenjin politics, and therefore nationally, has been built around devising an enemy for Kalenjins to fight, then rallying his troops – a horde of MPs and former MPs, political brokers and grassroots wheeler-dealers.

His politics in the immediate post-Moi era coincided with a drift by Kalenjins, along with other Kenyans, to more progressive stance. Throughout the Bomas conferences, Ruto helped catalyze – not as a matter of beliefs – the Kalenjins’ push for regionalism, aka majimbo, and reduction of Presidential powers among other pertinent reforms. At Naivasha his goalposts had changed, and he was instrumental, as Hanzard reports show, to whittling down devolution and Parliamentary oversight.

But post-election violence had catapulted him to a sort of magical status among the Kalenjins, who felt touched by his then inevitable ICC case. Now as Deputy President, Ruto faces new challenges, of which the proposed land laws are but the tip of the iceberg. Kalenjins leaders can also answer the question – Do Kalenjins have land grievances?

- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/ruto-kalenjin-and-land-question#sthash.eG3gox9s.cqCQ20We.dpuf