Why farmers want
to split Konza Ranch
The following is an abridged version of a presentation by the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Konza Ranch Mr David Mutangili during a public hearing of the National Environment Management Authority(NEMA) on the pro-posed sub-division of the ranch to its owners
“The purpose for which we are here today is to present to the general public the proposal to sub-divide the Konza Ranching farm into individuals parcels for both agricultural and commercial purposes.
The farm we are talking about is that parcel of land whose Land Registration Numbers are:
1. 9918/1 - 1435Acres
2. 5936 - 1200Acres
3. 7714 - 92Acres
4. 1741/2 - 396Acres
5. 1741/1 - 500Acres
6. 1734 - 5000Acres
7. 5933/1 - 345Acres
8. 363 - 895Acres
9. 1731/R - 3040Acres
11. 1731/2 - 131Acres
12. 4938 - 1100Acres
13. 7225/2 - 700Acres
TO-TAL 17479 Acres
These 17 parcels of land which include 2 for Kima Estate would bring complications during sub-division. Therefore a proposal was made to amalgamate them.
By a letter dated August 24, 2010, the District Physical planning Officer, Makueni gave a letter of “No Objection” to the sub-division which he favorably recommended.
Probably you would wish to know how we had arrived to this state of affairs in the first place and whether this was the best option for this ranch.
The history of Konza Ranch is long and may sound confusing to some of you. But I will try to give you the chronology of the ranch from the beginning to date.
Konza Ranch was established during the colonial time, first as a grazing scheme under the 1954-59 Swynerton plan. After independence, the Government of the late President Kenyatta encouraged the formation of co-operative and societies and land buying companies so as to acquire the white men owned ranches and farms.
Konza Ranching and Farming Co-operative Society was formed then in 1964. Most farms in the area which were purchased under those terms have since then been sub-divided. These include Ngaamba, Kalembwani, Malili and Aimi ma Kilungu.
The total area of the land which members want to be sub-divided into agricultural and commercial plot is 17,479 acres. These will take away the following acreage as follows:
(i) Agricultural plots of 10.8 acres
= 12,601.45 acres
(ii) Commercial plots of 2 acres
= 3,199.8 acres
(iii) Public utility plots = 1,679 acres
Total = 17,479 acres
Public utility land includes roads, hills, dams ,boreholes, zero plots, cattle dips, water tanks schools, hospitals, ad-min-is-tration plots and quarries.
A major flow in developmental planning of ranching in the dry lands is that both the European settlers and the African owners who took over after 1963 did not an-tici-pate or prepare for modernity and hence did not plough back some of the profits for the growth of the in-fra-struc-ture. As such the outputs and especially the benefits kept on declining.
In 2007, in an effort to overcome this challenge the Board of Directors with assistance from the Ministry of Livestock and Marketing as well as the Ministry of Co-operative Development prepared a strategic plan to cover the period of 2009-2014.
This was intended to expand and di-ver-sify the society products/business, boost beef and milk production and to become a leading supplier hay and breeding stock in the region.
To implement this Strategic Plan, a total of Sh.24 million was needed. When this plan was presented to the AGM of 2008, the members rejected the idea and instead started agitating for the sub-division of the remaining land.
In agitating for sub-division, the mem-bers gave some reasons:- They wanted to settle their expanded families, use the land as collateral for borrowing for borrowing money from commercial banks and to sell and raise money to meet their personal needs.
The Government officials present at the meeting tried to intervene but in vain. The shareholders gave the following three conditions for the proposal to be con-sid-ered: They demanded that the Government gives a grant to the society for the implementation of the plan, a State guarantee to the society to borrow money from Banks at low interest rates to restock the farms and, finally, that the Ministry of Livestock to second technical staff to the society to boost the management.
During the 2009 AGM none of the above conditions has been fulfilled and this time the decision to subdivide the Ranch was passed with 1290 members supporting, and only six opposing.
On December 19 2009,a special AGM was called to confirm the above resolution but this was called off by the Commissioner for Co-operative Development without giving plausible reasons.
However, the resolutions was con-firmed on April 19 2010 during the Special AGM meeting when farmers learnt that the State was not interested on the revamping of the ranch.
The decision to sub-divide the remaining land was not as a consequence of low returns or mismanagement. Between 1999 and 2011, the annual dividends paid to members were about Sh. 42 million with shareholders getting between Sh. 1,000 and Sh. 3,650 per person and if the farm is being down run the members would have not been paid dividends.
Some 15-20 years ago, this level of dividend payments would have made economic sense to the shareholders. To date, however, the cost of living is so high that members consider it more beneficial to manage their own small parcel of land. Moreover, they have also witnessed their neighbors in the already sub-divided ranches benefitting tremendously from their small parcel of land.
This sub-division project would have been a simple and straightforward matter. However, the recent developments in the wider Athi-Kapiti landscape area have complicated the project.The reasons are no doubt related to the interest shown by the Government to put up the following various de-vel-opment projects in the area;
ü The first In-for-mation Commu-ni-cation Technology Centre in Kenya.
ü The elevation of the KPLC Pump Station NO.8 into a major inland fuel collection depot.
ü The de-vel-opment of a major In-ter-na-tional Airport.
If this is not so then I stand to be corrected. Besides, land speculators, brokers and middlemen have aggressively infiltrated the management of the ranches in order to claim some stakes.
In particular for the Konza Ranch, the Executive Committee have been ha-rassed left right and centre by powerful in-di-viduals who want to steal from the investment which originates from years of self deprivation so that our sons and daughters can live a better life when we are gone. The idea is to in-timi-date us and kick us out of office so as to install puppets through whom they can fulfill their evil intentions . In short they want to wrestle your land from you in one way or the other.
Despite all this harassment and because of the unwavering support of the members and some well wishers, we have pressed on with the plans to sub-divide the land . In particular we have done the following:-
We appointed a sur-veyor to guide us in the ex-er-cise.
We appointed an Enviromentalist to pre-pare an EIA re-port on our be-half to NEMA.
On June 21, 2010 we ob-tained a “No Ob-jection” per-mit from the Makueni Land Control Board.
On August 19, 2010, we gave notice to the public on the intention to amal-gamate, sub-divide and change use from purely ag-ri-cul-tural to include commercial, residential, educational, utility/purpose and industrial use.
On August 24, 2010, we obtained a “ No Objection” permit from the County Council of Makueni.
On March 14, 2011, NEMA approved the contents of “Notice to the Public to submit comments on the EIA report” which we subsequently ad-ver-tised in the Nation Newspaper of Monday March 21 2011 and Standard Newspaper of Monday March 28, 2011.
In all these ad-ver-tisements in the public media we did not receive any comments objecting to our proposed project. We were in fact shocked when a copy of a letter written by none other than our Mem-ber of Parliament Hon. Harun Mwau. His letter dated April 26, 2011 was not copied to us at all or to our pro-fessional consultants.The letter was based on the EIA report .
The project under discussion has the following objectives:-
(a) To collect each member an ag-ri-cul-tural land measuring 10.8 acres (12,601 acres)
(b) To allocate each member a commer-cial plot measuring 2.0 acres (3,199.8 acres)
(c) To provide for:
Roads - 432 acres
23 dams - 95 acres
4 cattle dips - 8.8 acres
8 boreholes - 8.6 acres
10 water tanks - 1.0 acres
Public utility plots - 256.9 acres
To raise money to pay for these sub-di-vision is through sale of ranch houses and sixty acres of land."
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