All I want is my land, 83-year-old man cries out to Nicholas Biwott

By KIPCHUMBA SOME

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Nakuru, Kenya: Kigen Maina remembers vividly the events of that August afternoon, 24 years ago when police officers stormed his homestead and turned his family’s world upside down.

“The police were everywhere in my compound mowing down our houses, destroying everything we owned,” he said.

“They seemed to derive some devilish pleasure out of it”.

He had just returned from Nakuru where he had gone to seek the intervention of then Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner Yusuf Haji against a powerful neighbour who was making life difficult for his family.

Joshua Kiprono Cheserem, the father of then Energy Minister Nicholas Biwott, had obtained a court order to evict him from a piece of land they had lived in with his family for nearly 30 years.

Mr Biwott was a powerful minister in President Moi’s inner circle at the time. He is also one of Kenya’s wealthiest people. His visit to Mr Haji — now Garissa County Senator — turned out to be of little help to  Maina. The PC had thrown him out of his office saying the matter was beyond him.

Dejected, the retired police officer rushed home to his family to announce to them the bad news and strategise on their next move.

Higher power

Little did he know that he had already lost the fight. On arriving home, he was confronted by the eerie spectacle of 12 armed Administration Police officers demolishing his house.

After ascertaining that all his family members were safe, he sat under a tree and watched as the officers brought down the house in which all his seven children were born.

His wife and daughters wailed and wept uncontrollably as the main house, in which  Maina had lived since 1963, collapsed into a heap of iron sheets, boards and mud.

The menacing officers, working with power saws, then demolished the houses belonging to his sons.

In a matter of minutes all that they had worked hard for was now a pile of rubbish.

For him there were no tears; just the profound sadness that not even the fact that he had once worked as a police officer protecting others, he could not protect his own family at the hour of need.

But yet he was philosophical about it all: “I did everything a man, a father, a husband could do to protect his family, but I was ranged against a higher power,” he said.

It was an unseasonably cold afternoon in November 2013, when we met Maina’s family at their small wooden shack in Toot village, Elgeyo Marakwet County.

Mist enveloped the land and a slight rain followed, turning the compound of their modest house perched on the ridge where the dizzying sheer drop over to the spectacular Kerio Valley begins, into a muddy mess.

A cold, sharp wind whistled through the slats of the three-roomed wooden house they have called home since that event, with the cold biting into the bone.

Princely sum

As a matter of courtesy, tea is habitually served to visitors stunned by the cold.  Maina, 83, squinted in an effort to get a closer view of his visitors from The Standard On Sunday.

“It is a simple story really,” he began. “We had a deal with Mr Cheserem which he reneged on and he used his influence against me and my family.”

In 1963, Maina said he bought a one and-a-half acre piece of land from the late Cheserem for Sh700 – a measly sum today, but a princely sum at that time.

Nearly 30 years later after he had moved into the land, he got into trouble with the former minister’s father over documentation of the land.

 Maina said trouble began around 1987 when he persisted in his demand for  Cheserem to hand him the title deed for the land he had bought.

“I pleaded and begged him for us to complete the transfer of the land to my name, but he was never keen on it. I did not know he had changed his mind,” said  Maina.

 Cheserem had other plans. Instead of giving Maina the title deed, he told him that he was going to refund him the Sh700 being the purchase price of the land in 1963.

“How could I accept that? Where could I get another piece of land for that kind of money almost 30 years later? It was an unfair proposal from him,” he said.

In the face of  Cheserem’s intransigency to turn the land’s documents over to him, Maina sought the intervention of the High Court in Eldoret.The courts referred the matter back to elders for arbitration.

Eviction order

William Bayas was the chief of Kitany Location when the elders sat to deliberate about the case. He should have been present at the proceedings but he was not.

 He explained why:

“On that morning, the Elgeyo-Marakwet District Commissioner at that time, Aggrey Mudinyo, picked me and my assistant and took us for some duties faraway. There wasn’t anything important really to do, but we understood that it was a plan to prevent us from attending the proceedings,” he said.

Nonetheless, in their absence the elders ruled in  Maina’s favour.

Immediately after the case, Mr Mudinyo and the District Officer who had handled the case were transferred. Mr Wilson Chepkwony was posted as the DC and Mr Javan Sagero was posted as the DO.

Dissatisfied with the elders’ verdict,  Cheserem, who passed away in 2009, took the matter back to the High Court. Maina said he was informed of the case and attended a few sessions.

The family said they did not have enough money to attend all the case sessions in Eldoret town, about 50 kilometres away and that is how they lost track of the case.

But in one of the sessions she attended, Esther, Maina’s eldest daughter said she heard Biwott’s father testifying that her father had used his influence as a police officer in 1963 to grab the land from him.

At this time their lawyers, Gimose and Choge Company Advocates, withdrew from the case without giving any reasons for doing so and transferred to Nairobi.

Maina said he had no money to engage another lawyer.

“We had stretched our financial abilities to the limit, and we had nothing else to give,” he said.

And thus the family remained in the dark about the progress of the case until May 9, 1990, when the Elgeyo-Marakwet acting DC, a Mr MW Mwangi visited him and handed him the eviction order issued by the High Court in Eldoret.

The order wanted him to vacate the land in six months’ time. Deprived of options, Maina made one last desperate effort to save what he believes is his rightful property.

In June 1990, a month before he was evicted, in his last act of desperation Mr Maina wrote a letter to President Moi pleading for help against his powerful neighbour.

“I would like to appeal for your personal intervention in the above land dispute. I bought it for Sh700 from Mr Chebwai Arap Cheserem who is the father of Hon Nicholas Biwott, the Minister for Energy, in 1963. Last year 1989 the old man wanted to reclaim the land but I refused so he got a court order to evict me despite overwhelming evidence from village elders that he had sold it to me.”

“Over the last 25 years I have developed the land, planted tea and fruits and built a nice house. I retired from the government after 33 years of service in 1987 and I have nowhere else to go and no capital to start a new life. Please assist me and my family. I am now an old man,” read the letter.

It is unlikely that the letter ever reached President Moi, but as Maina was contemplating alternatives to save his property, armed AP officers visited him again on July 24, 1990 with a fresh order.

The new order, signed by Chepkwony, the then  Elgeyo Marakwet DC, wanted him to demolish the houses and vacate the land within 10 days.

“I went back to the DC for help, but he said he had been warned not to interfere in the case. He gave me a referral letter to take to Hajji,” Maina remembered.

Mr Hajji, then the Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner proved to be of little help to him. “He looked at the letter and just dismissed me from his office,” he said.

On the fateful Monday afternoon in August 1990, just as he arrived from his meeting with the PC, armed AP officers stormed the compound and brought down the houses using power saws.

There were seven houses in all, including a barn and houses for two of his sons. Within the year, the officers came and uprooted the tea bushes.

The family resolved not to salvage anything from the ruins of their former home. Within that year a member of the provincial administration came with a government vehicle and carted away the iron sheets.

Bad name

The family was housed by friends and relatives for a while. Enraged by the incident, a relative donated a piece of land and neighbours helped in building a new timber house for Maina’s family.

 “People were angry at what had happened to us. It was an injustice in the eyes of many and that is why they did what they did for us. This house we live in was raised up by neighbours in a record five days,” he said.

In the years after this incident, chief Bayas, who retired in 1999, said he made several attempts to raise the issue of Maina’s plight with Mr Biwott.

“I went to Nairobi personally and met him at his offices in Jogoo House. I told him that the land issue was giving him a bad name and he should resolve it. He told me that Maina had actually grabbed his family’s land including some two and half acres adjacent to the one his father took back,” he said.

Although they had an agreement he signed with Biwott’s father when he bought the land, they believe he was tricked into returning it.

 According to the family, one of Maina’s sons, John Kigen, a senior police officer who is now deceased, handed over the document to Mr Biwott after the former minister promised that he would give them more land.

“He later told us that he had given the document after Biwott promised to give us more land if we returned the document, but that never happened,” Maina said?

Gabriel, Maina’s eldest son said that he met Biwott sometime in 2005 and raised the issue of his family’s land. “He told me he wanted to conclude the matter soon, but I have not heard from him since then,” he said.

The paths of the two families would cross again in 2005 when Maina’s wife Pauline, now deceased, was arrested in 2003 for allegedly damaging Biwott’s fence during a demonstration.

Campaign issue

Although she was put on probation in the case, Gabriel, a prison’s officer in Eldoret said his mother died a broken woman.

“It was hard on all of us, but I think ignominy of living in such reduced circumstances eventually took its toll on her,” he said.

The piece of land that  Cheserem had gotten back from Maina remained unutilised until two years ago when it was fenced and trees planted on it.

Inevitably, the matter became a campaign issue for Mr Biwott in the local politics of Kitany location and the larger Keiyo community.

While doing his campaigns to be the Elgeyo Marakwet County Senator in last year’s elections, Maina said he confronted Mr Biwott during a campaign meeting in a local shopping centre.

“I had heard that he told people that he had given me a five-acre piece of land to replace that which his father took from me and that I had refused. But that is a lie. I asked him to clarify in front of the crowd what land he had given me. He told me, in front of that crowd, that he was going to give me land near a primary school here. But I have never heard from him since then,” Maina told The Standard On Sunday.

Months-long efforts to reach Biwott for comment did not bear fruit. His personal assistant William Chepkut did not pick calls made to him by this writer neither did he respond to text messages sent to him.

We informed one of his lawyers in Eldoret, Ledisha Kipseii, about the story but she said she would not comment on the matter since she had not been given authority by Biwott to comment.

We also got in touch with one of his bodyguards more than a month ago and told him to inform Biwott about the story but he informed us this week that the former Cabinet minister had not responded.

 Maina is an old man of 83 years now. His health is failing and his greatest worry now is that he might not be buried in the plot of land that he bought from the sweat of his brow.

“I did not steal the land. I bought it with my sweat and savings. And I do not want to take somebody’s property illegally. All I want back is what was unfairly taken away from me,” he said.