Kenyan government’s pledge to resettle the Mau Forest evictees is not a forgotten story as a section of public entities claim, President Uhuru Kenyatta has promised.
President Kenyatta has also said that despite the increasing need to conserve Mau forest, the government will never resort to carrying out inhumane evictions.
The more than 400,000 hectare piece of land that makes the total Mau forest in Kenya’s Rift Valley was declared severely destroyed in 2009, several years after the Kenya Forestry Service issued a 14-day eviction notice to occupants of the forests who had for a long time cut down trees to create room for settlement.
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This notice has however been politicized across a number of governments down the line, with the issue appearing to have spilled into the Kenyatta government to haunt his tenure.
In fact in the recent past, the settlers in the Mau forest who are mainly the Ogiek of Kenya have been fed by malicious incitement by the government’s opposition that they should not accept to be relocated to places that are far away from their original land, a situation that would reduce the Kenyan government’s pace in relocating the Mau forest evictees into better land.
President Uhuru Kenyatta has however assured the Mau Forest evictees that the government’s efforts to conserve the Mau and other water catchment areas will have no shade of forceful evictions.
The Mau forest is one of the country’s biggest water catchment areas, important for protecting ecological diversity, regulating climate patterns and acting as carbon sinks. Its reforestation will require about 96,000,000 million bamboo seedlings.
