Kenyan President William Ruto has announced the start of a plan to rehouse 35,000 Maasai tribesmen who were evicted from Mau Forest land in 2019 for use as a nature park; a decision that has spelled catastrophe for the community, especially with the closure of schools allocated to the tribe in the Rift Valley area.
Investigators from the NGO Human Rights Watch found that in early July 2018, a combined team of Forest Police, wildlife, county and national administration were deployed in the forest to begin the forcible eviction of the Mau community. At least nine people, including two infants, died during the eviction.
The authorities claimed that the eviction was necessary to prevent deforestation and encroachment on protected lands, while the affected Maasai have been trying to validate their land titles in the country’s courts. The initiative has been unsuccessful because the Kenyan authorities decided at the time that the papers had been issued by corrupt officials.
Ruto has promised to compensate the tribe for the decision executed during the mandate of his predecessor, Uhuru Kenyatta, as he made known in a speech during an interfaith mass in the city of Narok, in the southwest of the country.
«The issue of Mau forest is settled, on my part. It is time to start planting trees, installing water towers and finding an alternative settlement for these evictees,» the president said in comments reported by the Sunday weekly of the newspaper ‘The Nation’.
In October last year, a local court ruled in favor of the Nigerian government in its decision to evict the Maasai from the land, resulting in the closure of 15 schools in the surrounding area. Since then, Maasai families have complained that their children, without the protection of the school, have been exposed to labor and sexual exploitation in the labor camps in the area, where they are now housed.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
