Maathai Shouts Above Din of Politics on Kenya’s Mau Forest

Kenya’s Nobel laureate and environmentalist, Wangari Maathai, has sent a strong message to her country’s political class urging that forest conservation was important to reclaiming depleted resources.

Protagonists in the east African nation’s fragile coalition government have taken divergent positions on a symbolic tree planting exercise on Friday that was to have been led by president Mwai Kibaki in the 675,000 acre Mau forest with loyalists of Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) skipping the exercise.

Professor Maathai warned Kenya’s water resources could be diminished a third of its current capacity within three years.

“It is estimated that per capita need of water is 1700m³. Kenyans are using 600m³ which is less than half but by the year 2012, unless we are very aggressive in protecting our forests and harvesting rain water, it is estimated that Kenyans will have a per capita of 190 m³ which would be precarious,” she said.

A press communication from State House Nairobi released earlier suggested the president had other important engagements, including witnessing the swearing of a new set of judges dispelling the assumption that he will be taking the lead.

But prime minister Raila Odinga led a section of cabinet ministers and other government functionaries to a station within the vast Mau complex where he launched the tree planting, an exercise supported by the private sector, NGOs and the Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Another group of politicians, mostly within his Orange Democratic Party (ODM) and legislators from Rift Valley province where the forest is located have been fronting for compensation running into millions of dollars for illegal landowners who will be uprooted by the government move.

The area of southwestern Kenya is a water tower for 10 million Kenyans. But illegal settlement and deforestation have destroyed 24 per cent, or 107,000 hectares (264,000 acres), of its trees over 20 years.

“What happens to the Mau, which feeds Lake Victoria and the White Nile, has big implications for a region where 23 million people are afflicted by a fifth year of drought”, Reuters reported late last year.

But analysts have warned that the fall-out from the controversy could affect the result of the next election in 2012, and could even trigger more of the ethnic bloodletting that shocked the world after the last poll.

Illegal settlers have been forced out as part of efforts to restore Kenya’s five main water towers faced with the prospects of drying up in the Mau Forest.