Nairobi is Kenya’s capital city. This city of 4 million inhabitants today has stoically held to the status of East Africa’s financial, technological and communications hub since 1907. Nairobi has a long history spiced by local cultures, trade with Persia, Middle East, India, the Far East and the beginning of British colonialism.
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Honourable RailaOdinga, the two men who have dominated Kenyan politics in recent times, caught the world by surprise on Friday, 9 March 2018 with a stunning announcement that they would work together, ending a row over 2017 elections, and paving the way for a new national purpose, a ‘unified Kenya.’The meaning and impact of this declaration is largely in the hands of the Kenyan people.
Sometime back in 1976, then Kenya’s founding Father Mzee Jomo Kenyatta gazetted the Tana River Primate National Reserve (TRPNR) as a special protected area for two endangered primates and their riverine forest. What however the government officers did not tell Kenyatta is that he had gazetted several Pokomo villages. Right at the centre of the reserve Pokomo villages were thriving. They still reside in these villages to this day.
To this day the riverine farming community of the Pokomo residing along the Kenya’s main river the Tana is still traumatized whenever the World Bank is mentioned. It is the same story for the Wardei and Orma pastoralists’ communities, who neighbour the Pokomo.
On a hot day in early January 2014, Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta donned a dust coat and boarded a Massey Ferguson tractor in the coastal delta locale of Galana-Kulalu which borders Kilifi and Tana River counties, 250km north of Mombasa. With the press in tow and smiling guests President Kenyatta drove the tractor ploughing the land. This tilling act signified breaking the ground of his coalition government’s most ambitious agribusiness model the Kshs 250bn ($2.37bn) 1.2million acre Galana-Kulalu Food Security Irrigation scheme. Much of the 1.2 million acre land is in Kenya’s Tana River Delta which is majorly fed by Kenya’s main river the Tana River.