Solai tragedy victims caught between family, quest for justice

The tragedy shook the Solai community and the larger Nakuru County to its core. The country was hungry for answers.

Yet, this past May, the fifth anniversary of the Solai Dam tragedy, passed with no mention in the local press of the incident.

With the exception of "from the corridors of justice" snippets around the court case brought by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the story of the worst dam disaster in Kenya's history has largely faded out.

Curious about what the local community feels about the tragedy five years on, we took a trip to Solai. We didn't know what to expect but were reassured by what we found.

In the media scrum that typified the coverage of the tragedy in 2018, many reporters reached for "sleepy village" to describe Solai. But picturesque is closer to the mark. It is dotted with relatively new red-roofed homes, a legacy of the Red Cross' efforts to house those whose homes were swept away.

We meet Tabitha Wanjira at her home near the road that snakes through the village. She was hesitant to give Red Cross full credit for her house, instead crediting the Mansukh family, the owners of the killer dam.

"To be honest, I have never seen the Red Cross build houses this way," Wanjira says, adding, "I can take you to the mud houses built by Red Cross for the victims of other tragedies outside Solai so that you see for yourself what I mean."

Casting her mind back to the night of the tragedy, Tabitha says she was at first unsure where the loud rumbling noise she could hear was coming from.

"I was cooking when I heard it. I even switched off the gas thinking it was emanating from the cooker," she recalls. When she went outside to check, a neighbour informed her that the noise was probably coming from a burst dam up at the farm.

That's all that Tabitha, who remembered that it had been raining heavily all day, needed to hear. She rushed into the house and bolted out with her then-three-year-old child. She scampered to safety right in the nick of time. A few more minutes inside the house would have spelled disaster for her and her child. Her house was swept away. Like most survivors, they sought temporary refuge at Solai Secondary School the next morning.

"The family delivered food and much-needed blankets to us. They also brought doctors to check on those like me who had sustained some injuries," she says about the Mansukh family.

Wanjira confesses to harbouring some natural but unpleasant emotions in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.

"I was a bit angry at the world, at God, and the [Mansukh] family at the time but seeing how carefully we were cared for after the tragedy made me change my mind. I personally saw [Mansukh] Patel moving around the community to console and comfort survivors and was touched by that," she says.

The news cameras were trained on the vast Solai Estate for weeks after the tragedy. The conversation naturally turned to who the alleged culprits were.

An excavator covers a mass grave during the burial of a section of Solai Dam tragedy victims in Subukia, Nakuru County, on May 16, 2018. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]

There's the oft cited legal rule in Rylands versus Fletcher case at the Senate. It says that a person who for his own purposes brings, collects and keeps in his lands anything likely to do mischief if it escapes, must keep it in at his peril. If he does not do so, he is answerable for all the damage which is the natural consequence of its escape.

The DPP would later bring charges against Perry Mansukh, the managing director of Solai Group, and eight others, among them officials from Nema and the Water Resources Authority, for manslaughter, neglect of duty, and failure to prepare environmental impact assessment reports of the dam.

The case took the usual twists and turns of the criminal justice system, until April this year when Naivasha Chief Magistrate Nathan Lutta put the nine on their defence after listening to 36 State witnesses.

But before the defence could set out to rebut the prosecution case, some victims applied to join the case with a specific request of cross-examining the defence witnesses. The defence opposed this application and the matter is still pending ahead of defence proceedings.

As they haggle in court, another set of victims want nothing to do with the case altogether.

Stephen Njuguna (62) is one of the residents who is vocal about his opposition to the case. He lost three family members in the tragedy; his daughter, who worked at the Solai farm, his son, and one grandchild.

Njuguna is the Organising Secretary of the Solai Dam Recovery Self-Help Group, which has written letters to the DPP requesting to have the matter settled through a community-led restorative justice mechanism.

"The view of the community has always been that the best way forward is through a structured and constructive dialogue with the Patel family to find a way to take care of those who lost loved ones, property, and livelihoods," says Stephen who has lived in Solai for more than 40 years and has a firm grasp of the lay of the land.

Njuguna and Wanjira say the court case doesn't have the blessing of the Solai community.

"I was among the four people appointed to make representations to a Senate Committee at the time. My message to them was that we shouldn't make this a matter for the courts but one for the Solai community to deal with. I remember many of the senators nodding in approval," Njuguna says.

He wants the case terminated altogether and the community to resolve whatever issues are outstanding with the family.

There has been concerns that the Mansukh family may be trying to use its considerable wealth to carry favour with the Solai community.

Mumbi Kiragu, a resident of Nyakinyua, however dispels this saying the family's largesse long predates the dam tragedy.

"The family is popular in the community and their generosity has run for decades now," says Mumbi who lost her mother in the tragedy.

Njuguna volunteers another example. "In fact, the family gave away title deeds to an 800 acre piece of land in the Nyakinyua to 650 residents months before the dam burst," he says.

Tabitha and Stephen allege that some lawyers and human rights outfits with ulterior motives have tried to turn the community against the family.

"They wanted us to throw stones at a family we had lived peacefully with for decades," claims Tabitha.

They also accuse the human rights groups of being duped by non-residents angling for a cut of the payouts to victims of the tragedy.

Njuguna says his efforts to keep a pristine and exhaustive list of those affected by the Solai Dam tragedy was informed by the confusion that was witnessed after the 2007-2008 post-election violence.

"A lot of people who didn't have genuine claims for compensation from the government took the place of the real victims of the violence," he says.

He says the Catholic Diocese relied on the list he prepared to guide its efforts to help the residents.

"Our final count that was signed off by the area DO, Chief, and a representative from the Red Cross listed the number of houses destroyed in the tragedy at 37," says Njuguna.

This reporter had a peek at Njuguna's records it includes a list the deceased (including their death certificates) as well as survivors.

Such is the confounding story of the Solai tragedy with a state determined to nail the accused, section of victims who have embraced the dam owners and a family which just wont cease helping their immediate community.