My mother is one of dozens of community members who have been wounded or killed in recent months in Laikipia West.
Tragically a gang of cattle raiders shot my 78-year-old mother through the leg in May 2021 whilst she was driving alone near Ol Moran. I am still nursing her back to health.
Armed bandits from Baringo county are a constant threat to life and property in this area and usually engage mainly in livestock theft. They steal animals and drive them into the Rift Valley, where they are seldom found.
However, in pre-election years such as this, several hundred armed men from far away invade the area and terrorise residents including ourselves. They are politically incited, and their aim is to drive away local inhabitants.
Laikipia Nature Conservancy was purchased from a Kenyan company in 1972 with leases that still run for many decades. From 1983, the land was dedicated to conservation and community projects. It has since created one of Kenya’s most important water towers and is 100 per cent owned by Kenyan citizens.
LNC believes that for biodiversity to thrive, it requires a model that strengthens local community livelihoods via social enterprises that draw on the effective management of its natural resources. To that end, LNC has developed a range of enterprises in which community members have a sizeable stake.
LNC has been dedicated to building a world-class tourism asset for Kenya, in parallel with a commercial grazing project for the pastoralists of western Laikipia. It has also made wide- ranging investments in farming and value addition in arid and semi-arid areas.
Due to careful management over four decades, the LNC is now a key water tower, visible from space as a verdant green landscape in an otherwise parched region. Through the preservation of extensive forest cover, it is the primary water tower for the World Heritage Sites of Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria, providing life-giving rain for smallholder farmers and pastoralist pasture in both Laikipia and Baringo counties.
Prior to the incursion in March 2021, LNC was grazed by thousands of local pastoralist cattle under a structured grazing scheme. LNC has a partnership with the National Drought Management Authority, designed to commercialize 1,500 to 4,000 local livestock in an annual fattening and breed stock improvement cycle to generate income for neighbouring pastoralists of over Sh100 million annually.
These local cattle are no longer able to access the grazing lands due to the ongoing land invasion.
Cattle and wildlife can coexist, and we believe community and conservancy must be mutually beneficial to each other, so we have decided not to have our own cattle to dedicate our well-managed grass bank to the neighbouring communities.
However, in this pre-election year, the whole of Laikipia West has witnessed a planned insurgence of men from other counties with hundreds of weapons and this has debilitated the project. Many areas of the conservancy no longer have any grass left at all and local pastoralists livelihoods are at stake.
The conservancy has also developed farming and value addition initiatives, including a state of the art nursery for Hass avocado seedlings, which is distributing 40,000 seedlings to 500 local farmers in parallel to the conservancy’s own avocado plantation, supplying over 1,000 beehives and creating a local honey industry and designing an innovative eco-charcoal project employing hundreds of local youths. The conservancy’s education facilities have catered to over 10,000 students.
In total, these projects contribute over Sh700 million to the regional economy annually and provide reliable employment to over 1,000 people.
The LNC is committed to continued collaboration with the national and county governments to find a lasting solution to improved security, conservation and the welfare of the community.
LNC looks forward to the successful eviction of the remaining militia within its property and a resumption of its work with government to deliver water, grazing and livelihoods to its local communities.
