Nowhere to Go LKNR Section

On May 18, 2024, the Kenyan government demolished and burned down the homes of over 200 Indigenous residents of Baringo County in Northern Kenya, with the intent to drive them out of their ancestral lands. The evictions carried out by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) targeted families residing in and around the Lake Kamnarok National Reserve (LKNR), with the stated goal of protecting its ecosystem.

According to Community Land Action Now, a local NGO, the evictions left “people homeless in the cold weather and with no source of livelihood.” Families reported losing valuable property, including businesses that had sustained them economically, forcing them to stay with friends or sleep outside for days on end. On May 23, an Environment and Land Court judge ordered the KWS to stop evictions following a lawsuit filed by the Kamnarok Farmers Group, but the order came too late for many.

“My parents gave birth to me here…when my children saw the house burning, they ran away, and have not returned.” — A victim of violence inflicted by the KWS

“We lost one lady,” a community member said in communication with the Institute, “Because she was sick, she was thrown out, her house was burned, she had nowhere to go. She died in the cold.”

An Unjust History

These recent evictions are the latest development in a long history of enforced land dispossession for the conservation of the LKNR. Inhabited by Indigenous pastoralist and farmer communities for generations, the area around Lake Kamnarok was officially declared community trust land in 1980. That designation, however, lasted only until 1983, when the Reserve was created. The Kenyan government gazetted 87.7 square kilometers of land situated in the Kerio Valley for conservation and protection, violating the community land adjudication from just three years prior.¹ This action left residents’ homes under the administrative control of the KWS and precluded them from gaining ownership rights to their ancestral lands.

The county authorities never initiated dialogue with those residing within the area at the time. Instead, they allowed for the land to be demarcated as a national reserve, without the Free and Prior Informed Consent of impacted villagers. “The government never did what we call public consultation,” a local human rights defender explained to the Institute, “They just came and gazetted the whole area, including our farms, to be a national reserve because of the presence of a small lake.”

In 1990, seven years after the land’s demarcation, the KWS handed out eviction notices to over 900 households within the Reserve. With their land rights stripped by the 1983 gazettement, hundreds were forced to leave the generational homes of their families under the threat of violence from the KWS. Many were arrested and convicted of crimes like “trespassing” and “destruction of forests.” 

In 2009, the County issued an order demanding that every inhabitant of the Reserve vacate, however, the order was stopped following intense community mobilization. “I was born in 1958 in the area now called Kamnarok National Reserve,” a community member told the county at the time, “it disturbs me when I am referred to as an illegal settler in the land where I was born.” Similar eviction threats impacted the reserve’s 15,000² residents in 2012 for oil exploration, 2014 for conservation, and 2019 for the same reason. Community members have consistently demanded title deeds to their ancestral land and reparations for the government’s past actions, neither of which have been offered thus far. 

The KWS has employed violent and illegal methods to drive residents from their homes. In October 2011, a member of the Kamnarok Land Rights Association testified in front of the County Council that 33 Kamnarok villagers, imprisoned and held in a neighboring reserve for the “destruction of forests,” had been forced to pay bribes for their freedom. In March 2014, the KWS confiscated the farming equipment of over 3,000 residents, raising alarm about food insecurity for those residing in the Reserve. The KWS has also banned villagers from cultivating their land,³ and erected structures to prevent grazing.

The gazetting of the LKNR in 1983 gave the KWS full administrative control over the lands of thousands of people, with the stated goal of clearing all human habitation for the purpose of conservation. As a result, hundreds have lost their homes, thousands have lost access to their main livelihoods of farming and pastoralism, and people have witnessed their friends and family wrongfully arrested for living on the land of their ancestors. Despite this devastation, both the national and county governments have entirely avoided accountability and refused to compensate the victims.

On May 10, 2023, the National Land Commission of Kenya determined that this “compulsory acquisition” constituted a “historical land injustice.”⁴ It ruled that victims were entitled to an official apology, compensation, and comprehensive benefit-sharing programs for all proceeds from the LKNR. A benefit-sharing system was, however, never implemented, leaving community members forced to grapple alone with the impacts of state-sanctioned violence that has rendered them and their families impoverished, unhoused, and incarcerated.

A Flawed Environmental Justification

The Kenyan government has defended its actions by pointing to the ecological devastation of the lake, which it blames on pastoralism and farming. Before the gazettement, Lake Kamnarok boasted the second-largest population of crocodiles in Africa, along with 400 elephants and 13 other mammal species. Today, the lake is referred to as a “shadow” of its former self, continuing to shrink and dry up, causing the deaths of thousands of crocodiles and the fleeing of elephant herds.

The government claims that evicting local farmers and pastoralists is necessary for the ecosystem’s preservation. However, a comprehensive 2020 study published in the Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection found that the degradation of Lake Kamnarok is mainly due to heavy rainfall experienced between 2004 and 2018, which eroded land around the valley causing rampant sedimentation. The study explains, “It is evident that the major factors that have contributed to the changes taking place in the [Kerio Valley] basin are the climatic changes that have led to land degradation and siltation of the lake.” The climatic conditions of the valley have had a number of environmental consequences, including the creation of the Kiptilit gully. The gully, a fissure likely caused by soil erosion and rainfall, has drained water from the Lake into the Kerio River for over a decade. It is cited, along with siltation, as one of the primary causes of the lake’s decline. 

While human activities like logging, farming, and charcoal burning have undeniably exacerbated the lake’s depletion, experts and community members assert that there are ways to rehabilitate the lake without removing the local inhabitants. After the lake dried up in 2013, Baringo County initiated an effort to fill the Kiptilit gully and restored the lake by 2014. However, the gully soon reappeared and remains unfixed. It continues to drain the lake’s water, along with scores of other issues due to chronic underfunding. Other strategies, like de-siltation, planting trees along the lake’s edges, and using gabions and earth-filled bags to trap sediment have been implemented with documented positive results, but would require significant investment to be scaled up and effectively stop the depletion of the lake’s waters.

The Build-Up to Recent Evictions

In 2014, the governor of Baringo commissioned a task force to “develop detailed recommendations on boundary, compensation and resettlement of affected households in the Lake Kamnarok National Reserve.” The task force’s report was delayed until 2017, when the county defunded the initiative before it could present its findings. Instead, in 2018, the government released a slate of recommendations attributed to the task force without the approval of its members. “We hereby notify the concerned,” reads a letter signed by six members, “that any report presented to the governor without our signatures and without the members’ recommendations, we distant [sic] ourselves from it.”⁵

The recommendations presented to the council ran counter to pleas from the community. While it recommended compensation to those illegally evicted from their land in the 1990s, the county rejected the idea out of hand, claiming the existence of expelled farmers and pastoralists had constituted “human encroachment.” Building on the same flawed premise, the task force recommended that the KWS order all 15,000 residents of the Reserve to vacate, an order that was made in the early months of 2023 and used to justify the torching of homes in May 2024.⁶ 

Further, the task force recommended that the county and KWS relocate three primary schools, a community church, and a shopping center from the reserve. These recommendations, acts of cultural erasure, were welcomed by the county assembly and scheduled for implementation in 2021, but were halted because of community protests and mobilizations.⁷

The KWS, on the other hand, remained unphased by community advocacy. In early 2023, the Service ordered “encroaching” community members to harvest their remaining crops and stop all farming of the land by August of that year.⁸ “Every time we try to till our lands, they send the police to stop it,” a community member told the Institute, “We are still inhabiting the lands, but we cannot farm.”

At the same time as these repressive orders, the KWS published tender documents announcing their intent to construct 15 km of electric fencing around specific areas of the LKNR – following up on another task force recommendation – with the intention of “reducing human-wildlife conflict.” No consultation was done to determine the fencing’s impact on pastoralist grazing patterns or land cultivation, or on any of the three schools located within the reserve. These omissions prompted community members to write three letters to the KWS requesting more information, letters that were never answered.⁹ Community members are left worrying that fencing could be erected at any moment, obstructing their pastoral livelihoods and driving them off their land, while receiving no communication from the government.

Fortress Conservation in Kenya

The evictions of Indigenous inhabitants for the goal of conservation in the LKNR area is not an isolated incident, but rather the product of global policies that incorrectly pit Indigenous rights and environmental preservation against each other. This false dichotomy has manifested in the widespread creation of “protected areas” around the world, where governments force human inhabitants out of their ancestral lands for the purported aim of maintaining ecosystems and wildlife. This model, which has come to be known as fortress conservation, often necessitates the forced eviction of Indigenous communities to fulfill the goal of entirely uninhabited areas, which is why many have come to criticize it for propping up violence and human rights abuses.   

Kenya is a signatory to the UN’s 30x30 initiative, aiming to conserve at least 30 percent of the world’s land in protected areas by 2030. Currently, around 20 percent of Kenya’s land is under a conservation framework, with 11 percent of its land being conservancies, which are large swaths of land cordoned off to protect animals and plants. Conservancies in Kenya have long been criticized for incentivizing and facilitating the expulsion of Indigenous communities. By far the largest player in the Kenyan conservation economy is the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), an umbrella organization with 45 individual member conservancies operating in control of over 8 percent of Kenya’s total land. The Trust employs concerning conservation methods once described by the United Nations Development Programme as a “hard power strategy which entails policing the community and…shrinking grazing land.”

The Trust is bankrolled by millions of dollars from US, Danish, and European development funds, as well as funding from major international NGOs like the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund. NRT has been implicated in serious human rights abuses and has been accused of fueling inter-ethnic conflict and community violence, as well as carrying out extra-judicial killings and disappearances through its armed rangers. NRT’s troubled reputation has seen it kicked out of counties, faced numerous legal suits from hundreds of community residents, and targeted by mass community mobilizations.

Kamnarok “Conservation” and the Northern Rangelands Trust

Financial and administrative connections between the Northern Rangelands Trust and the conservation of the LKNR have left Indigenous residents questioning the role of foreign governments and NGOs in destroying their livelihoods and seizing their land, and worried that NRT will bring its violent conservation practices to their communities.

When evictions in the Lake Kamnarok area were first brought to the media’s attention, NRT was immediately implicated. Villagers blamed NRT along with KWS and the county for the expulsions, which some suspected as paving the way for the establishment of a wildlife conservancy. These allegations are linked to the 2019 signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the county and NRT, which many now oppose following revelations of serious human rights abuses and increased conflict in areas where NRT establishes conservancies. NRT has not publicly acknowledged a connection to the LKNR, and bills its conservation practices as “community-based” methods “created to support the management of community-owned land for the benefit of livelihoods.”

While NRT purports to reject the fortress conservation model, financial documentation reveals its tie to the conservation of Lake Kamnarok that has resulted in hundreds violently expelled from their homes. Baringo County’s 2018-2022 Integrated Development Plan sets aside KSH 100 million (USD$778,210) in funds for the “infrastructural development” of the LKNR, with the goal of “reducing human-wildlife conflict.” Under that item, NRT is listed as an “implementing partner” for development and conservation efforts, along with the KWS. NRT’s role in infrastructure projects in the LKNR has fueled community suspicions that the Trust is propping up evictions for “conservation” on their ancestral homelands, calling into question the Trust’s supposed commitment to community land rights and conservation practices.

Further, in a meeting held on July 18, 2024 between senior NRT officers, government officials, and community stakeholders, the NRT Baringo County Coordinator told attendees that the Trust is planning to “support Baringo County and the KWS with the [Kamnarok Game Reserve] management plan once the conflict about land ownership with the community is sorted.”¹⁰ NRT’s engagement in the LKNR’s conservation contradicts both the Trust’s supposed support of community-led conservation and the official policies of its powerful donors towards Indigenous Peoples. Further, its claim that it will only get involved once the conflict is “sorted” is questionable, given that the CIDP states that it has been involved since 2018. 

Conclusion

Should the Kamnarok Farmers Group lose its lawsuit against the KWS – allowing it to expel all “encroachment” into the LKNR – 15,000 individuals face evictions and loss of their homes and livelihoods.

In the name of conservation, only more death and destruction would be brought to a community characterized by decades of injustice and violence at the hands of the government. The KWS must instead halt all further evictions and end the practice of torching homes, which they have deemed “normal operations.” Proven conservation solutions should be prioritized, by funding efforts for de-siltation, tree planting, and gully removal, which are documented to have worked in the past and are necessary to address the ecological challenges facing the lake. The county and the Northern Rangelands Trust should respond to community concerns and explain why NRT and its Western donors are involved in the “development” of an illegally gazetted reserve, in partnership with an entity that continues to violently expel hundreds of Indigenous residents. The Kenyan national and county governments must finally repair the disastrous legacy of forced dispossession and expulsion by compensating victims of previous evictions and allowing them to return to their ancestral homes. 

In direct communication with the Oakland Institute, local human rights defender Isaiah Biwott explained the incapacitating fear facing residents around the lake right now. “They are living in uncertainty and cannot farm. They are food insecure and don't know what will happen if we lose the case,” he explained. “Most have nowhere to go.”