Protecting fragile Mother Earth from destruction is a risky undertaking in a country styled as a model of environmental conservation. What a paradox.
Cruel death is the price Joannah Stutchbury and fellow activists pay for conserving the environment. An assassin’s bullet claimed Stutchbury's life outside her home in Kiambu.
Her mistake was to campaign against encroachment and a proposal to build a road inside Kiambu Forest. Other colleagues who have lost lives at the hands of land grabbers are Joan Roots, Edmond Bradley-Martin and Joy Adamson.
Silence on such senseless murders and failure to apprehend and bring the culprits to book is meant to instil fear and scare activists fighting against the destruction of water towers, pollution and human activities on riparian lands.
Under threat of extinction are Kenyan rivers, streams and lakes. The human activities threatening these resources are thriving largely because environmental protection legislation does not exist and where it does, it is not enforced.
Matters environment are politicised, divisive and emotive to say the least. Environmental protection is the genesis of the enmity between opposition leader Raila Odinga and Deputy President William Ruto.
Ruto, then Agriculture minister in the grand coalition government, opposed the evictions of settlers from the Mau Forest to restore the threatened water tower. Many water bodies, including the world's second-largest freshwater lake, Lake Victoria, and the Mara River (of the wildebeest migration) owe their existence to the Mau.
Raila and Nobel laureate and environmentalist Wangari Maathai were not spared derogatory tags for speaking out against the destruction of water towers and forests. Prof Maathai and government were not the best of friends over her campaign to save forests from greedy charcoal traders and timber merchants.
Parliamentary committees under whose watch environmental degradation continues are to blame. The irony is that Kenya houses the United Nations Environment Programme that in 2022 will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding in Stockholm, Sweden.
Some leaders are doing something about the degradation. The Rasanga Amoth Foundation is rehabilitating a tributary of Lake Victoria, Firio stream, that is choking in pollution and silt. The initiative is an individual effort by Siaya Governor Cornel Rasanga and not a county affair.
The million-dollar question is, for how long will the guardians of Mother Earth live in fear of loss of life in a country that should be a model of environmental protection.
Freelance journalist: [email protected]
