The backlash against Ledama was not justified, he had a point

The backlash against Senator Ledama ole Kina over his rabble-rousing remarks uttered at the February 22 BBI rally at Narok should be tempered with context. In cases like these, it is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff, the message from the manner of its delivery.

Before we get carried away, let’s agree on what he said and what he did not. No, he did not call for the mass expulsion of non-Maasais from Narok. Rather he wanted some basic principles respected. Immigrants to go about their business in legally acceptable ways.

Landowners not to subdivide their land into plots, which attract speculators. Above all, he called for non-locals to defer to the indigenes when it came to elected political leadership positions. This was the position every Maasai speaker at the Narok rally took.

The line about Maasailand being for Maa people may upset non-locals. However there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

That’s why the place is called Maasailand. Just like we have Kipsigisland, or Kambaland, or Kikuyuland, or wherever.

The decades-long influx into Kajiado and Narok of immigrants who have totally different lifestyles from the pastoralist inhabitants should not be used to deny the Maasai their space. Or to trample on their preferred way of life.

Ah, the Constitution. Any Kenyan can live and own property anywhere in the Republic, it sonorously says. Blah blah blah.

Again, the concept of willing-seller-willing-buyer when it comes to land has legal sanction. Trouble is, the Maasai are often confronted with a different reality from the theory. Take the case of Mau forest, for instance.

Even if the land titles issued to encroachers into the forest were legal (which most were not), that doesn’t supersede the environmental calamity the destruction of the forest was causing.

To the Maasai, all the legalese amounts to what colloquially we call kizungu mingi. Hot air.

They were the first ones to experience the tragic environmental effects. Drying up of streams whose catchment is the Mau. Depletion of pasture their livestock herds depend on. One can go on. Waving a title deed to a piece of land carved from that vital ecosystem is downright insulting to the Maasai. Mau forest’s degradation poses an existential threat to them.

At bottom is the issue of respect, and of consideration. Everybody is free to condemn Senator Ledama. But it is immoral to turn a blind eye to the historical injustice the Maasai have endured. They are among the most marginalised communities in the country.

By almost every metric – access to education, jobs, entrepreneurship opportunities and so on – they lag behind. Further, their numbers, which are barely a million, disadvantage them. They limit their ethnic bargaining power nationally compared to the bigger, richer groups.

Their political clout is not like, say, that of the Luo. In other words, the Maasai have to navigate their way in a world that is, for them, fundamentally unfair.

Every Maasai child has grown up hearing about the outrageous 1904 and 1911 “agreements” with the British, which through trickery, massively dispossessed the community of much of their pre-colonial lands.

The 1904 arrangement required the Maasai to vacate to European settlers a vast expanse of their Rift Valley territories stretching from Naivasha to Solai. The community was effectively split into two.

One set of Maasai clans were to occupy the Loita plains in present-day Narok county while the other clans were told to move northwards the Laikipia plateau. Come 1911, the colonial government then changed its mind and decided Laikipia was ideal for settler ranching. The Maasai there were again moved to what is today Kajiado county.

The Maasai have never been compensated for their loss. When the British-funded, post-independence buyout of settler farms in the White Highlands was carried out during the Jomo Kenyatta government, the Maasai never got any compensation for their lost territories.

The successor Moi government only accelerated the rape of Maasailand with its overt support of the Kipsigis encroachment into Mau forest, where incidentally the late president proudly owned an expansive tea estate and factory carved from the forest.

Of course, Senator Ledama’s grand ambition is to step into the perch occupied by the late – and highly controversial – paramount Maasai kahuna, William ole Ntimama. His arrest last week is a great boost to that intended career elevation.

There’s no need getting into the legal issues involved, but politically Ledama has now entered, with inadvertent State “assistance”, into the Maasai Big League.

Here is a few points for the Maasai to ponder: Stop selling your land indiscriminately. All your post-independence political leaders have been grossly complicit in this. In the end, it may be wise to rethink whether that pastoralist lifestyle equips you with the skills to keep up with other more thrusting Kenyan communities.