Using land as a political tool will light fire

Michelle Obama frowned and looked away when her husband chose to take selfies on his mobile phone with another woman.

Barack’s ears must have been chewed by the gracious madam once they were out of the burial of World’s moral icon Nelson Mandela. But this week, a 21-year-old Mexican man accidentally shot himself dead while taking a selfie while holding a borrowed pistol to his head.

No one knows if Oscar Otero Aguilar was eager to get the post on Facebook, but what started as a prank ended up in death.

Analogously, a similar situation is playing out here in Kenya, but the difference is that Raila Odinga’s Coalition for Reforms and Democracy has stacked bales of grass and doused it with petrol.

If you thought the Jubilee side would come in with fire engines, then you are wrong.

You have also seen the matchboxes President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy William Ruto, along with their coterie of political actors led by Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu and Leader of Majority in the National Assembly Aden Duale, brought to the scene.

They have each lit a match stick and are about to throw it into the stacks.

In the meantime, both sides are working the motor of their mouths, spitting epithets at each other. Let us now apply the analogy to our circumstances.

The fight for Independence was about land.

The reason the Nandi resisted colonialism, students of history know, was because the tribe then existed as a nation with all the attributes that apply to modern nation-states. They had a common language, culture, and territorial awareness that they jealously guarded even to the point of death.

So on their perceived boundaries, they had scouts monitoring incursion by the enemy, and when the railway and telegraph lines brought by the colonist reached, whey they perceived to be their national boundaries, they struck, killed and uprooted.

The colonist would distort the history of Kenya’s tribe that resisted colonialism the longest, long after Captain Lugard and Chief Waiyaki, had had that brotherhood feast of blood that you learnt about in history.

Kenyan communities would later rise up against colonialism, even those that had accepted it.

In fact, the Kikuyu launched what conservative historians call an uprising. In other words, rising against an arrangement you had initially agreed to.

To cut out this peeling of historical chapters, the colonist was driven out and Kenyans got back their land, but retained the Bible, which they had received from the mzungu in exchange for their land.

Colonialism had displaced Kenya’s original population, especially the Kikuyu in Central, as well as the Kalenjin and the Maasai in the Rift Valley.

But Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and his cabal, whose distinction was the appetite for land and more land in as many places as possible, went for the kill.

The rest is history and years later, land is Kenya’s festering wound, one that has stubbornly refused to heal.

Now, it has popped up in the Coast the way it did in Rift Valley many times back, manifesting itself in terror or Al Shabaab attacks, when in actual fact, it is ethnic cleansing. The Mpeketoni attack, in which at least 60 got killed, targeted a group ferried to the area on lorries and settled by the first Kenyatta government.

Now back to our analogy. Uhuru revoked titles for 500,000 acres allotted to 22 private firms in the last Government, and seems to suggest that James Orengo, the then Lands minister, as well his party leader Mr Odinga, knew something about.

So Jubilee in its wisdom decided that the best way to deal with the issue was to throw it at Cord, the very opponent Mr Kenyatta had earlier said was responsible for the killings in Lamu.

In response, Orengo said he was a target of retaliatory attacks by Jubilee, especially the Deputy President who has had not more than a few issues to do with land in court.

And predictably, Mr Orengo released his own list, and added that the Kenyatta family too has vast lands in Coast.

In other words, he seems to imply that the President, a privileged son of the family, was living in a glass house and still had the temerity to throw stones.

Mrs Ngilu came out hawkish in obedience and declared she would cancel all ‘fraudulent’ titles dating back to 1963.

She did not say how she would achieve this. The issue of titles is sacred and once politics is sucked into it, then you know the meaning of the phrase playing with fire.

Another Jubilee member who speaks faster than the tailoring machines you saw outside shops in the village centres, has come out and announced that Cord leaders will be probed for land fraud.

The CID, at the behest of Jubilee, are investigating the land issue.

The National Land Commission, whose chairman is at war with Mrs Ngilu because it seems it only exists in the Constitution, but not in the Jubilee-led governance machinery, has also declared it will investigate alleged land fraud starting from 1963.

In the end, we are seeing several reports of land theft in the country taking shape, and all fuelled by politics.

From where I stand, I see a big problem ahead.

First is whether Mr Kenyatta, Mr Ruto, Mrs Ngilu and Mr Duale really believe they can be trusted by majority of Kenyans to deal with the land question for which the dispassionate and non-aligned National Land Commission was formed.

Secondly, do they expect that their proposition will be accepted when it is already tainted by politics? Thirdly, what formula would be used to identify the “land thieves” without discrimination and what the ‘post-mortem’ operations will do to the country’s sense of unity and stability?

As for Cord, even though it claims to be a victim, how do they propose that the issue will be dealt with outside the Commission without setting the country on fire?

That is why I said one side, which claims innocence, has poured paraffin on the bales, and the other side is holding the matchsticks ready to light the fire.

If that happens ladies and gentlemen, be prepared to be scalded, smouldered or even incinerated by the Jubilee-Cord fireball.