Corruption, mismanagement strangle vital Kenya watershed
By MICHAEL BURNHAM AND NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of Greenwire
Published: May 17, 2010 NAKURU, Kenya — The wooded ridge rising to the west of this bustling provincial capital is the home of one of Kenya’s greatest natural resources and one of Africa’s biggest environmental crises. The Mau Forest Complex encompasses almost 1 million acres of wilderness, interspersed with small farms and sprawling tea plantations. The watershed feeds 12 rivers and hydroelectric dams downstream and replenishes some of Africa’s most famous lakes and wildlife preserves, including the Serengeti in Tanzania. Kenya can ill afford to lose the Mau, but that is what’s happening. A legacy of corruption, cronyism and inept management threatens to derail a fresh government effort to replant the forests and protect the water table. In the nearly 50 years since Kenya won its independence from Great Britain, huge swaths of the Mau have been cleared to expand the tea plantations and make way for new ones on land handed over to a chosen elite. Add to this roughly 600,000 settlers staking their own claims to the Mau, most illegally. They continue to tear down forests for cropland today. Activists warn of illegal logging activities on government lands, carried out under cover of darkness as officials willfully look the other way. It is the same in other forested parts of the country, notably the Aberdare Range and around Mount Kenya. The encroachments have reduced Kenya’s forest cover from 12 percent to 1.2 percent today, according to the United Nations. Rivers and lakes have shrunk, and last year’s record drought led to a rationing of power and water. Government officials are eager to reverse the trend and rehabilitate the Mau and Kenya’s four other highland “water towers.” “We cannot let the rivers that feed Lake Victoria, Lake Nakuru, Lake Naivasha and Lake Turkana die,” Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi declared at a recent U.N. water conference here. “Restoring the Mau complex is therefore a matter of protecting humanity.” … The Mau has lost about 490,000 acres during the past 15 years, according to Odinga, including more than 61,000 acres from government-backed excisions in 2001. Satellite data show that the complex’s southwestern Maasai Mau area lost about a third of its tree cover between 1986 and 2003; the eastern Mau area has lost almost half of its tree cover since 1973. …
