Squatters an area set aside for construction of the 50MW Kopere Solar plant in Nandi county want it moved to non-agricultural land.
They say the project would deprive them of land for settlement should the owner decide to settle them.
The land has been leased out to Kopere Solar Power Company by the family of former Agriculture minister William Odongo Omamo for 20 years.
The Omamo family owned close to 10,000 acres under coffee and sugarcane in Mberere area of Tinderet constituency.
The farm had close to 1,000 squatters, most of them casual labourers.
The construction of an electric perimeter fence around the 500 acres is going on.
Squatters chairman Hillary Cheruiyot said they would be deprived of their inheritance if the project is established before they are resettled.
They spoke at Mberere yesterday where they vowed to use legal means to be resettled.
“If they don’t settle us then we should be prepared to die because we will have lost the inheritance of our forefathers who were evicted from their ancestral land by white settlers in the 1920s,” Cheruiyot said.
A French company plans to generate power for the national grid by 2020.
Tinderet constituency has a large number of squatters owing to the high agricultural potential of the farms.
MP Julius Meli in January warned the squatters against using unlawful means to take over the farms. He advised them to instead form land buying companies to purchase from those holding genuine title deeds.
During the KANU regimes of former presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, large chunks of the ADC farm were allocated to influential people in government.
They were allocated rich agricultural land under cane while others got coffee farms. The squatters were relocated to the outlying hills.
