Watch out! Disaster looming for Kenya
Politicians cared little about the burning of East Africa's largest forest – until the lights in Nairobi started going out. Daniel Howden reports
The destruction of the Mau forest is fuelling a drought that threatens the future of the Maasai Mara game reserve
Under a slate-grey sky Francis Maina is hunched over a tree stump. He secures a rusted chain around it and signals for the tractor to start hauling. The blackened base of the mature hardwood is wrenched from the earth like a tooth from a jaw. As he works, the nearby standing forest soaks up a gentle afternoon rain, pulling it into the soil. In Maina's razed field the water runs down the cratered hillside in channels of black mud.
The 60-year-old farm labourer stands in the midst of an ecological rape scene: scorched earth scattered with the burnt stumps of centuries-old trees. He is one of thousands of Kenyans who have settled inside this supposedly protected forest that stretches from the Mau escarpment down to the Maasai plains and up to the central highlands.
The largest forest in East Africa acts as a water tower for an otherwise arid land, feeding its lakes and rivers, regulating the climate and refreshing its underground acquifers. But an epic drought has plunged Kenya into an ecological crisis and its dried up rivers can no longer turn the blades of the hydro-electric turbines. Power rationing is switching off the lights in the capital Nairobi for days at a time.
Which means the fate of the forest has finally caught the attention of Kenya's warring politicians who have vowed to evict the "squatters" from the Mau. While they argue over land claims and compensation demands, Maina and hundreds like him are finishing the job of killing the forest. "The politicians have their own land," Maina says with a scowl. "Now they want to move the poor people so they can take our land."
Turqa Jirmo, a senior warden with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), is heading a task force set up last year to save the forest. He still hasn't recovered from his first task which was to fly over the land for four days to assess the damage. "I was amazed. I never believed the destruction had gone so far. I couldn't see the forest because of the charcoal smoke coming from the ground."
Charts on his office wall map out the complexity of 12 forest blocks that make up the Mau's 400,000 hectares. Mr Jirmo estimates as much as 40 per cent of it has already been destroyed. The challenge of saving what's left is complicated by illegal loggers or "wood poachers" as he calls them; a flourishing illegal charcoal trade, and the deeply politicised issue of the settlers. The green lines of the protected areas on his maps are marked with red zones where past governments have doled out woodlands to their supporters in a blatant example of land for votes.
While the politicians haggle over compensation in their Nairobi offices lit by petrol generators, speculators are using the hiatus to slash and burn as much profit as they can ahead of possible evictions.
In February, the Mau complex was engulfed in flames, with an inferno that destroyed thousands of hectares and burned for four days. "People deliberately set the fire," Mr Jirmo remembers. "There are confusing signals from the politicians and people are trying to harvest as much of the forest before the government can evict them." The head of the Mau task force sees any failure in his mission in the starkest terms. "The forest is a lifeline for Kenya. Without it Kenya has no future."
The disaster is already present in Lake Nakuru, renowned for its spectacular flamingoes. The two rivers that feed the lake have dried up and the KWS is having to pump water from deep underground to keep the animals alive. Kenya's vital tourist industry would buckle, he warns, as already the spectacle of the Great Wildebeest Migration has been ruined by the historically low levels of the Mara river. World-famous parks, like Kenya's Masai Mara and Tanzania's Serengeti would also be at risk.
Conflict between humans and wildlife will rise, as "rivers no longer flow to pastoral areas." And urban centres will not escape. Sondu Miriu, one of the country's major hydro-electric stations that lies downstream from the Mau, is already running at one-tenth of capacity. And competition for water could even re-ignite the ethnic clashes that last year killed as many as 1,500 people and displaced tens of thousands more. "This is going to be a security problem," Mr Jirmo warns.
Kenya's Nobel prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai is orchestrating the "Enough is Enough" campaign to halt the destruction and identify the culprits. Underneath the environmental catastrophe, she asserts, is a political scandal as venal as Kenya's notorious public financial frauds.
The small Ogiek tribe of traditional forest dwellers have found themselves at the unwitting centre of the sting. "The Ogiek were used as a way to get access to the land," explains Christian Lambrecht from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which is based in Nairobi.
When the Ogiek's population was assessed by a UK-funded team in 1993, it was put at 3,000 people. By 1996 that figure had grown to 9,000.
And when the government announced a settlement scheme in 2001, it had jumped to 14,000. "The settlement scheme was aimed at securing political support. Extensive lands were given to private individuals many of whom were in power at the time," says Mr Lambrecht.
One of the most heavily populated illegal Mau settlements is Sierra Leone, given its name after being handed out to army officers returning from peacekeeping operations in West Africa. Entire stretches of the Mau are carved into lucrative wheat farms openly owned by ministers who served the former president Daniel Arap Moi. And when current Prime Minister Raila Odinga set out to name and shame land-grabbers in the Mau he found half of his own political allies among them. The poor that have cleared, rented or bought plots here now offer cover to the bigger interests who stand to benefit from any government compensation.
Godana Guyo is a KWS ranger with 18 years of experience and admits that he is pessimistic about the chances of saving the forest. He stands by while Francis Maina and a young labourer who gives his name as "just John" pile earth over the smoking remains of split trees.
The ash and soil have been fashioned into an earthen charcoal kiln. Precious hardwoods (including the endangered Podo tree), worth hundreds of pounds as timber, being carbonised are sold for 200 Kenyan shillings (£1.80) per sack. It is typical of the exploitation in the Mau that it makes no economic sense. Exhaustive studies from UNEP have shown that the country's hydro-electric power, its tourism sector and its vast tea estates, which rely on rainfall from the Mau, are under threat for the short term benefit of a few individuals.
Or in the words of the beleaguered ranger, Guyo, standing in the rain watching charcoal bags loaded onto a trailer and unable to arrest anyone: "It's big damage for small money."
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Comments
African kleptocracy, based in gerontocratic tribalist culture & exploding populations, is going to ensure that more Rwandas occur out of more Zimbabwes, everywhere that resource bases are plundered & shattered in this way.
The world's next few generations may well have to look on in horror at an unprecedented spectacle in the mother continent.
The rich nations are still not doing enough to help poor countries, therefore they will increasingly turn to unexploited areas to satisfy the needs of there growing populations.
In my last year there, I was nearly drowned in a flash flood near the Taita hills and two of my friends died in a train accident caused by flooding. I now realise that was the beginning of the end. Perhaps I am a coward, should I go back? It would not be easy for me as I can sympathise with all sides. I suppose in the end the overall good, the Common Weal, should prevail; and the forests be protected to the exclusion of all else.
It might help if the churches in Kenya took a stand over the Mau forest as they have more power than perhaps they realise...
I am so depressed, Kenya had so much to look forward to; once.
The US - has less than 10% of its original forest left. Produces 50 times the pollution per capita than Kenya. 50% of its population are obese.
Why no outcry? Because the 'west' has grown fat and lazy and doesn't like to be reminded that it destroyed its own natural environment over the last two hundred years. This was done to support rampant capitalism, new cars/homes/electricity etc etc. What's happening in Kenya is their own verison of ecological rape, but is by no means unique.
In truth the only way the natural world will survive is if it is no longer abused by mankind. As long as we exist the natural world is doomed.
with total land area at - total: 580,367 sq km
and the UK is at: 61,113,205 (July 2009 est.) - https://www.cia.gov/library/publication
with total land area at total: 243,610 sq km
so kindly get your facts right before spouting irrelevant comments.
I would have had more respect had you referred to governance issues.
This is a Kenyan problem and it goes back 50 years. It has never been addressed by Kenyans, so don't expect that to change any time soon. When there is no more forest on the Mau escarpment the wreckers will move on to Mount Kenya and the Aberdares, indeed they are already doing that. When Kenya becomes part of the Sahara desert "rich countries" will be expected to feed the Kenyan population, why would the "rich countries" be prepared to do that? They won't, and in 40 years what will Kenyans be eating? Check out the history of Easter Island to find out.
http://www.excellentdevelopment.com/new
If you want to volunteer and see first hand the problem and really make a difference then check out http://www.questoverseas.com/africa.p
http://www.campsinternational.com/proje
Things are really not good here in Kenya...and I doubt the politicians are going to wake up so we will just have to keep doing what we can do...
But it makes sense to the people doing it, the poor because the tea plantations and tourists don't pay them, they have no capital to start anything, the criminals/rich pocketing money from wheat harvests/charcoal because they enrich themselves for next to nothing. So if it cost the rich/criminals, and the poor had other income sources, there would be no problem? 'Easier said than done' but also easier than many similar situations as no complicating factors like tribal rivalry, war, smuggling routes, bushmeat. But i have no ideas.