Do I have any views on the previously unstoppable Building Bridges Initiative being brought to an abrupt halt by a decision in the High Court?
Only this: that I am glad to be living in a country in which even the most bitter and unrelenting political rivals, in the end, have to take their case before a court of law.
This cannot be said of all neighbouring countries.
Here is something else all Kenyans should remember: irrespective of how the all-absorbing battle for the Building Bridges Initiative finally plays out in the Court of Appeal, or the Supreme Court, or the National Assembly, at the end of it all we will still be left wondering how the country can create more jobs for its young people.
Large numbers of unemployed youth in any country are a ticking time bomb and a recipe for instability.
And the tourism sector is one of the areas in which Kenya can create more jobs, as we already have the infrastructure for training and deploying skilled workers in this sector.
Also, we have long gone past the stage where we depend on foreign investors to put up hotels and lodges within Kenyan tourist attractions. Local investors seem to have no difficulty raising the money needed to set up such establishments, where a suitable location can be found.
And it is in the finding of such 'suitable locations' that we run into a problem.
The tricky thing here in Kenya, is how to expand the sector by bringing in more and more visitors, without having a huge negative impact on the environment. And this problem relates primarily to the 'wilderness experience' which many who visit Kenya as tourists look forward to.
The question we have to answer is this: how can we get more 'wilderness' within Kenya?
This is where the concept of the 'conservancy' comes in:
The key drivers in developing the concept of wildlife conservancies on land leased from local communities were a small number of forward-looking safari operators who understood the importance of expanding the area of protected wildlife habitat beyond the parks if the wild animals were to survive in reasonable numbers.
They believed that small-scale safari tourism could be used to pay for the lease costs and conservancy running costs and to generate incomes and job opportunities for the landowners, creating a 'win-win' scenario.
One such innovator was Jake Grieves-Cook, former chair of the Kenya Tourism Federation, who came up with the idea of having a maximum of 1 tourist tent to 700 acres of conservancy and a maximum of 12 tents per camp.
This ensured that the form of tourism in the conservancies would be small-scale and tourism density was controlled. And this concept formed the foundation for the Mara-adjacent conservancies like Ol Kinyei Conservancy, Naibosho Conservancy, and Olare Motorogi Conservancy.
By linking payments to a lease fee per acre instead of an entry fee per tourist, this arrangement ensured that there was no pressure to keep adding more and more tourist camps to increase the income from tourism.
Also, by having payments per acre, the income was evened out across all the months of the year instead of having minimal income for 8 months and then everything coming in during the peak season of three or four months. This steady reliable income was better for the landowners.
A concept such as this, if supported as a matter of official policy, would make it easier for the private sector to create protected wildlife sanctuaries and conservancies outside the small official parks. They could also then find ways of linking them up with corridors and unfenced dispersal areas.
In this way then, would the 'wilderness experience' be extended beyond the national game parks, with clear benefits going directly to the indigenous communities whose group ranches tend to occupy land adjacent to game parks.
This is no easy task, as it involves leasing hundreds of individually owned plots and putting them together to form one or more conservancies. But at this point, it is the only viable way to add hundreds of thousands of acres of protected habitat to the existing game parks.
