Expedite all reforms

Self-serving politicians, whether as elected MPs or sitting out in the cold after losing their seats in 2007, have taken grandstanding to new heights recently, vociferously castigating the government for allowing the situation in Syokimau to deteriorate as it has. The history of the land saga in Syokimau indicts all of them as a class; after all, the issues surrounding the allocation of land in the vast plains of the Mavoko Municipal Council have been in he public domain since the Kenya Meat Commission went out of business in the early 1990s. Given the close proximity of the area to Nairobi it was only to be expected that speculators would descend on the area with plans for acquisition, subdivision and sale of the vast land. It was also to be expected that a villainous combination of Land Ministry mandarins, Mavoko Municipal Councillors, MPs and Nairobi businessmen and lawyers would take advantage of the situation and take innocent Kenyans for a very expensive ride.

The self-indulgent condemnation in the editorial pages of the nation's dailies and the self-righteous reports by news media of the pain and suffering of the victims of government demolition squads refuses to acknowledge that we are in the midst of one of the most complicated transitional periods in Kenyan history. Not only are we in the middle of implementing one of the most complex and complicated constitutions known to man, we are also attempting to reverse near forty years of one-party rule, corruption and gross institutional decline. In addition to the reforms that have been initiated in Ardhi House, we are attempting to reform the security services that have become a law unto themselves in all but name. And in all this we still have the spectre of a venal political class that blows hot and cold over the question of whether the Constitution should be implemented unamended or not.

It is callous to talk of teething problems at this time, but the demolitions that occurred in Syokimau this past week are just that in the grand scheme of reversing the effects of the corruption that flowered during the KANU era (1963 to 2002) and was allowed to entrench itself even more fully during the NARC administration (2003 to 2007). The first Kibaki administration failed to come to terms with the scale of the problems this country faced, concentrating almost exclusively in reviving the economy and Kenya's standing in the commity of nations. Perhaps President Kibaki was right in concentrating on these matters; after all, without foreign investment in Kenya, much of the programmes of his government would not have come to pass. Indeed, it is a s a result of some of the reforms he initiated then that the public infrastructure that had come to such a decrepit status was rehabilitated and expanded. Even with the failure of the first constitutional referendum in 2005, President Kibaki initiated many reforms in the public sector that are only beginning to bear fruit, including the publication of the National Land Policy in the second Kibaki administration.

Its implementation has met stiff resistance, both in and out of Parliament. The opposition has taken a robust position against the reforms initiated by Ardhi House, including the process of repossessing government land that had been irregularly allocated to individuals. The victims of the corruption that flourished, especially in the 1990s, are frequently individuals who have saved all their working lives to provide for their families a security that can only come from owning a capital asset such as a house or plot of land. The beneficiaries are frequently well-connected men and women who served the government in various capacities, whether as suppliers of goods and services, political fixers, senior civil servants and military officers, or politicians of all stripes. The calls should not be for the reform of the land sector but the expediting of the process already underway, including the investigation and possible prosecution of every person involved in the destruction of the sector. Kenyans should not be held at the mercy of an avaricious political class; they must repose their full faith and trust in public institutions that execute their mandates without fealty to political actors. It is the only way we can avoid a insurrection of the have-nots against the haves.