SUNS 4312 Thursday 29 October 1998
KENYA: UN JOINS CAMPAIGN AGAINST 'LAND GRABBERS'
Nairobi, Oct 28 (IPS/Philip Ngunjiri) - The United Nations has joined the campaign against the plunder of Nairobi's Karura Forest by land speculators commonly known in the Kenyan capital as "land grabbers".
"Nairobi, along with many other cities in the world, is urbanizing at a rapid rate. However, the process of urbanisation must take into consideration environmental factors," says the executive director of the Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Klaus Toepfer.
UNEP has agreed to provide technical assistance to the government of Kenya "to ensure the sustainable development of Nairobi."
"Karura Forest is a precious natural resource which the city cannot afford to lose," says Toepfer.
Although accounting for only 2% of Kenya's land area, closed canopy indigenous forests, like Karura harbour large percentage of the country's biodiversity, including woody plant species, large mammals, birds and butterflies.
The Karura Forest, which borders the UN compound in Nairobi, covers an area of over 1,000 hectares and serves as a water catchment area for the Thigiri, Karura, Ruiruaka and Gitathuru rivers on the outskirts of Nairobi.
The forest also acts as a "lung" for the city, helping to clear the air of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.
Kenya's opposition legislator, Beth Mugo, wonders why the government should destroy a forest just next to the UNEP headquarters. "If I were UNEP, I would just pack and go," she says.
Despite growing protests by environmentalists, opposition legislators and the UNEP, the government, in its latest edition of the Kenya Gazette, has degazetted "several hundred hectares of land" in Kiambu, Mt Kenya and Marmanet forests.
Environmentalists say more than 5,000 hectares of gazetted forest land is excised and given to politicians and wealthy Kenyans every year.
Two weeks ago, about 12 opposition legislators and environment activists stormed Karura Forests and set ablaze construction equipment worth over 80 million shillings to protest the grabbing of parts of the forest land by private developers.
One US Dollar is equal to 57 Kenya shillings.
John Makanga of the Nairobi-based Green Belt Movement says the "land grabbing", which started a few years ago, is done "by well connected wealthy Kenyans, with the full blessing of the Kanu (the Kenya African National Union) government".
He says all public land belongs to the people of Kenya and that the government only hold it on trust.
"The idea behind degazetting policy is unimpeachable. The government may remove the land from the list of officially protected areas only when it wants to build, say, a railway line or set up an industrial plant, but not to allocate the land to individuals," says Makanga.
To avoid further clashes between the protestors and developers, the government has deployed police in Karura Forest. "The police are here to protect the grabbers instead of the forest," says Kenya's renown environmentalist Wangare Maathai, who heads the Green Belt Movement, after clashing with the police last week.
UNEP has called on all stakeholders and developers to agree on management strategies.
"This would enable all the stakeholders to agree on ways of directing development away from these hot spots and into areas sustainable for development," says Toefper.
Nairobi is endowed with unique areas rich in biodiversity such as the Nairobi Park, Ngong, Oloolua and Karura forests. "I am particularly concerned by the loss of ecological functions and services as well as vital biological resources that may result from the destruction of, and disturbances to, the Karura Forest ecosystem," says Toefper.
Kenya is party to several biodiversity-related global and regional conventions, including the Convention on Biological Diversity signed by president Daniel arap Moi at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
Part of the negotiations for the Convention were carried out in Nairobi and Kenya played a leading role in brokering the final text.
"In the light of the commitment of the government and people of Kenya towards the protection of Kenya's rich natural heritage, I sincerely hope that the integrity of not only Karura Forest, but also other forest ecosystem in Kenya, will be protected for the benefit of present and future generations," says Toefper.