If you go to the beach in Kisumu town, you will see fishermen delivering their catch, women collecting water and children playing around on the beach or in the water.
This peaceful, idyllic scene, especially in the evenings, is a very pleasant sight and you could sit there for hours just enjoying the view.
Indeed, one of Kenya’s most iconic blue-chip companies uses this very image in one of its more evocative TV commercials.
Not once in many years of faithfully reading the newspapers daily have I ever seen a news story about fishermen or women who are fish traders or children who want to play on the beach and in the water being denied access to the water.
Worlds apart on the Land Question: From lakeside to seaside
Indeed, I am not aware there has ever been any wall built anywhere near the shores of Lake Victoria specifically to keep the locals away from the beach. But go to the other end of the country, to the Coast, and what do you find there?
Every few months there will be a news report of a new wall that has been built to block a well-established path local fishermen have used for generations as their corridor to the boats and the landing points for their catch after successful fishing expeditions.
And it is only normal to ask why you never hear of grabbed beach plots around lakes Turkana and Victoria and yet, when you get to the Indian Ocean, land-grabbing targeting beach plots has been in the headlines since the 1960s.
This is not even the worst of it – you will read often in the papers of clashes over land.
They are somewhat frequent in Western Kenya in the Kisii region, and perhaps most viciously in Central Kenya, where, even now, controversies over land-buying companies still result in deaths.
But what all these cases have in common is that they are mostly local affairs between villagers whose families and friends have known each other for generations, and are sometimes even immediate family.
But, once again, a completely different scenario is the case at the Coast.
They make entire villages disappear at the Coast
It is only at the Coast where villagers quietly going about their rustic business, tending to their farms and livestock, will suddenly find their agrarian idyll rudely interrupted by the roar of unannounced and unbidden earthmovers.
These machines will be part of a larger brigade, the head of which is a security team often including National Police Service officers and hired goons brandishing metal rods.
And in the eye of this storm will be the official representatives of a ‘mystery’ tycoon or ‘investor’, waving copies of ‘title deeds’, ‘eviction’ and ‘court’ orders that no one ever gets to read – in fact they could be blank sheets of paper or torn from a comic book!
In short, the life of that village comes to an abrupt end as the supposed ‘registered’ owner of all that land sends a small private army to lay claim on the only hope the villagers have known for 100 years.
There are many journalists who have suffered injury in the course of trying to cover such atrocities, but, thanks to them, it is now no longer the subject of speculative.
Only half-informed debate is on the public record that Coast is the only area of Kenya where an entire village can be uprooted so brutally and without ceremony.
Now pause for a minute and consider how in the rest of the country public facilities like beaches remain accessible to both rich and poor alike, with no walls in sight – but not at the Coast.
Even in those areas where there are bitter and murderous quarrels over land, there is no question of non-locals bringing in bulldozers to evict entire villages. Only at the Coast!
This gives you a clear insight into the depth of the historical land injustices that the Coast has endured both before and after Independence. This is the size of the problem and the depth of it.
Can anyone who has read of such instances of gross injustice fail to understand why there is so much bitterness over land at the Coast?
And can anyone deny that after all these years of enduring such injustice, coastal leaders now feel that the time has come to put an end to such injustice by using our voting strength to ensure the next Presidential election is won by someone who is determined to help resolve this longstanding crisis once and for all?
Still, there is no use reminding people of your voting power if you do not also lay out an agenda.
Indeed it seems to me that a major weakness of the Kenyan brand of politics is that the voters will often be guided purely by vague hopes of "development" and not an explicit regional agenda that can bring about that development.
Think about it for a minute: Do you really know what the development agenda is for historically marginalised Northeastern, or for the Lake Victoria region?
Perhaps the only region – other than the Coast – that has a clear agenda for development is Western Kenya. The leaders there are clearly resolved that the sugar sub-sector must be revived and the collapsing sugar factories refinanced and rejuvenated.
Also, that the Pan-African Paper Mills must be reopened after the many years since they were abruptly shut.
These are meaningful steps, but we must also ask if indeed these alone would be enough to lift hundreds of thousands of the residents of those parts from poverty.
What needs to be done either side of 2017 polls
Fortunately for us at the Coast, our development agenda is clear. And there is no doubt in my mind that either before or after the 2017 Presidential election we shall see its implementation.
And the following are the suggested massive interventions:
First and foremost is the giving out of title deeds to all who live on land on the Coast that has long been their ancestral land, and which has been surveyed but not registered in their names.
President Uhuru Kenyatta already started this process, but 60,000 title deeds are simply not enough to make an impact. We need about 600,000 such title deeds issued and handed over before the next election.
And in consideration of the coastal historical injustices over land, there must be a waiver in all the standard registration fees and other such costs, so that even the poorest of the poor get their title deeds.
Second, the process of surveying and adjudicating coastal lands must be completed by 2017 so that we go into that election able to convince our people that the day when all their ancestral lands will be properly in their hands is just around the corner.
Finally a fund must be set up to provide for the compensation of all those who have been victims of historical injustice.
Just as President Kenyatta set up a fund for the compensation of those who suffered torture or false imprisonment or even death under previous Kenyan regimes, so too must we now have a fund – of, say, about a billion shillings – to selectively compensate all those fishermen who lost their fish-landing points to beach resorts and all those coastal small-scale farmers who lost their farms to "property developers" and to supposed "investors".
This may not be a complete list of what must be done to address longstanding coastal injustices over land. But it is a start.
What I can say here and now without any fear of contradiction is that this is one of the key issues around which coastal votes will be cast in 2017.
And we are a three-million-strong vote bloc that has at last learnt the importance of voting as one.