Interior CS’s property list placed land at the heart of the next polls

Last week, I attempted to demonstrate why and how the definition and understanding of ‘Hustler’ has nothing to do with being either rich or poor.

Rather, it is mainly a question of motivation and agency; the idea that one can significantly transform their situation according to their aspiration through a determination to work hard in whatever pursuit opportunity allows.

The Ministry of Interior begged to differ, instead propagating the narrative that the Hustler conversation is about the rich and the poor, possibly engaged in a cataclysmic class war and violent conflict over resources.

The Cabinet Secretary demonstrated his personal commitment to this perspective by attending a chinwag with the National Assembly committee on Administration and National Security.

While purporting to give an account of security deployments related to the Deputy President, the Cabinet Secretary treated the nation to an impressive inventory of property holdings he associated with the Deputy President.

Thus, the Cabinet Secretary made it clear that the Deputy President was far from being a Hustler on account of vast land holding.

He accompanied these disclosures with outbursts targeting the Deputy President.

With supreme self-satisfaction, the Cabinet Secretary afterward departed, certain that he had put paid to the ‘Hustler Narrative’ for good.

Electoral contest

On the contrary, all the ‘super-CS’ achieved by his latest eruption was to once again showcase land as a potential site of engagement in the impending electoral contest.

Land has historically been a delicate, complicated and emotive subject.

Claims, grievances, disagreements and scrambles over rights, ownership, occupation and use of land form the bulk of past, present and potential future of conflicts in Kenya.

It is possible to outline four main phases in the evolution of land in Kenya and the accompanying mutation of associated claims.

In the beginning, land within tribal territories was administered as commons, freely accessed by all according to need.

The colonial period was defined by violent displacement and fraudulent dispossession of communities.

In claiming ‘all land not possessed by any prince or sovereign’, colonials deployed the racist view of pre-colonial African society – as primitive barbarians incapable of statehood or state-like organisation – to imply the Kenyan territory was, therefore, technically unoccupied and available for appropriation.

Only in the event of costly confrontation did the British change tack, use bribery and pretence of peace treaties and agreements to formalise fraudulent land acquisition.

Africans, therefore, woke up on a fine morning to find that they were now vagrants trespassing on Crown Land, liable to pay a raft of taxes through a system of forced labour that basically enslaved them.

The independence struggle was, therefore, based on liberating Africans from these atrocious impositions and restoring her freedom and dignity upon the soil of her land.

Immense broken promise

Not only was land freedom essential in anti-colonial efforts, it constituted our leaders’ express undertakings in mobilising people to support various political parties.

Freedom – and independence – has chiefly been an immense broken promise insofar as the post-independence elite reneged on their undertakings and generally mismanaged the land problem.

By accumulating tremendous tracts at the expense of their trusting followers, the post-colonial Kenyan elite complicated the matrix of land-related claims and grievances to a degree that stubbornly defies schematic resolution while compounding potential for conflict.

The initial native claims to rights over community land, welded to restoration of sovereignty, have run into ramifications over time. Cultural notions of identity and belonging are now profoundly invested in notions of what land constitutes.

A growing inventory of mineral wealth and natural resources intensifies the significance of land. Environmental pressure – owing to desertification and climate change – makes it more likely that land management will continue to pose existential implications for our society.

Chapter Five of the Constitution admirably takes all these complications into account and sets out the institutions by which the principles of land policy may be actualised.

Opposing poles of land problem 

The Truth, Justice and Reconcilliation Commission and the Ndung’u Land Commission reports provide useful hints on how Kenyans are suspended on opposing poles of the land problem.

Political engagement around the land question invariably ignites volcanic angst.

 The idea of a class war is principally anchored on the persistence of agitation for land justice by dispossessed millions, blind terror and reflexive aversion to the possibility of upward mobility by other means other than radical property redistribution.

This is denial as strategy: if we ignore the desperate underclass long enough, it will somehow disappear.

Land signifies memory and active presence of enduring injustice in Kenya, now spanning three centuries.

The super-CS’s indelicate forays have ensured the land question forms an implicit agenda of the impending political contest.

 It is a singularly uncomfortable subject for his indulgent sponsors, and they are definitely unimpressed with this instalment of performative heroics.

 @EricNgeno