Residents of Kapiti Plains in Mavoko have asked Parliament to help them get back land they say was taken by a government agency. The squatters said International Livestock Research Institute illegally pushed them out of the 32,000-acre land.
On Friday, elderly men, women and youths shed tears as they told the National Assembly Lands Committee about their ordeals since the land was grabbed. They said relatives have been killed, tortured and injured in clashes over the property. The MPs were on a fact-finding mission.
The squatters said their grandparents were buried in the land after they were killed. The parents died in clashes that followed the allocation of the land to ILRI. They said they were unlawfully evicted from the land. They asked the government to allocate the land to them because it is lying idle. ILRI no longer uses it, they claim. The agency says it bought the land in 1987. ILRI is non-profit,.
Committee chairperson Rachael Nyamai said they had received the residents’ petition through area MP Patrick Makau.
The Kitui South MP requested the residents to give them time. The committee met the Machakos county security committee at Athi River in the office of deputy county commissioner David Juma.
Machakos commissioner Abdullahi Galgalo and Mavoko MP Patrick Makau attended.
Nyamai said the committee will separately meet officials of the National Lands Commission and the ministry before compiling its report. The MPs toured the land to establish whether ILRI still raises cattle on it for research and if there are residents’ homesteads or settlements.
Makau said the land should be reverted to the more than 30,000 squatters. He said cartels were keen on subdividing the land.
