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.
The Federal Government has unveiled plans to set up colonies across the country to assist Fulani herdsmen in rearing their cows. This is in its effort to find a lasting solution to incessant farmers/herders clashes. The decision to establish colonies across the country was taken at a special security meeting with Governors of five dates of the Federation considered as epicentres of the farmers-herdsmen clashes and security chiefs in Abuja, the nation's capital.
Nigeria's Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, says that agriculture sector created six million jobs in the last two years. Chief Ogbeh said this while analysing the achievements of his ministry and the 2018 targets of the administration at a strategy retreat in Abuja, Nigeria's capital. He made the point while reacting to reports that over four million jobs had been lost in over two years of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led federal government. The minister explained that the six million jobs were created both on and off farms because of the huge increase in local rice production. According to Chief Ogbeh, Nigeria’s agriculture is heavily manual and to be able to reduce rice importation by 95 per cent, at least six million extra jobs have happened in the farm.
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.