Left Behind No More?
President Uhuru is heading to Gusii where he will talk about IDP Resettlement of Kisii IDPs two months to the election.
Good gesture, regardless of the timing and the motive, which we all know.
Yet, by the time Uhuru as then Finance Minister in the Grand Coalition government read the budget statement of Financial Year 2010/11; the government had spent Ksh14 billion in ‘IDP resettlement’.
This was seven years ago.
To date, the money spent on ‘IDP resettlement’ is nearing Ksh100 billion.
Trouble starts when nearly Ksh90 billion of this Ksh100 billion has only been used to resettle IDPs from one community, in total disregard of IDPs of/from other communities.
At some point in the resettlement craze, each household of this special community would receive Ksh400,000 while others got nothing.
In post-2011; with the ICC becoming a reality in Kenya, IDP resettlement became ready fodder for political posturing.
Uhuru, now an accused before the Hague based court as the financier of the Mungiki death squads of 2008, once again turned himself into a savior of his Kikuyu people.
Uhuru went overboard in resettling his Kikuyu ethnic group, who took advantage of the amorphous and opaque manner the process was being carried out to list and pay everyone, including fellows who were in Nyeri went 2008 happened.
All of a sudden, every Kikuyu was an IDP or a potential IDP. And not surprising, every Kikuyu IDP had some land, or property, or business, that was grabbed, or seized or destroyed in 2008. Then they realized you would be compensated, and data destroyed, and be compensated again, and again.
And you didn’t have to prove anything. You only needed to show up and say until you were uprooted by the skirmishes, you were doing business in Migori, Burnt Forest, Kimumu, Molo, etc and you would be included in the prosperity list of IDPs.
Whether you couldn’t point Migori or Burnt Forest or Kimumu from the map of Kenya didn’t matter!
In fact, so organized were they that in their makeshift camp dwellings, some sort of government was formed, with leaders and the led and a code of IDP conduct. There was even talk of a constitution and a Sacco.
As ‘fake IDPs’ took over; genuine IDPs, who also doubled as victims of the vicious skirmishes of the 2007/08 post-poll tragedy, found their voices and hopes for normalcy increasingly dashed by a new breed of ‘tragipreneurs’, that is, people who make money out of tragedies.
Factotums in government soon realized they would also make money by obscene allocations to IDP resettlements.
Warmongering ethnicists begun beating new war drums, sending chill warnings on how to vote in 2013.
Every successive fiscal year came with increased allocation to a budget line called ‘IDP resettlement’. And each year, ‘IDPs’ kept increasing in number, desperation and demands!
And the thieves in government who tolerated this looting scheme smiled all the way to the bank.
Like would later happen under Waiguru’s NYS, for every Ksh10,000 going to an IDP, genuine or not; higher up vegetables in the then Ministry of Special programs and their counterparts at Treasury would loot millions.
Anyway, as Uhuru heads to Gusii this week and rekindles debate on IDP compensation with what is going to be ideally empty promises of compensation to the Gusii, the fact of the matter is: no human tragedy of recent times in Kenya has seen so few steal so much from so many.
Random thoughts!
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