THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG

In the early 1990s, the Green Belt Movement launched a civic and environmental education
program. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in December 2004, Nobel Laurent Wangari
Maathai said that:
The purpose of the program was to help people “make the connections between their own
personal actions and the problems they witness in their environment and society. This
would also enable people to oppose all facet related to environmental degradation. 375
Maathai and the Green Belt Movement led high profile campaigns to save Kenya’s forests
and green spaces. In 1991, for instance, the movement saved Nairobi’s Uhuru Park from an
enormous tower block to be built by the ruling party. During the interview she noted that:
The dictatorship was still strong, and not amused by protests. Government security forces
and hired thugs that regularly inflicted beatings on such protesters, causing enormous
injuries to many and yet, they were not put off. You cannot protect the environment if you
do not have democratic governance and democratic space. 376
Wangari further explained how the country’s biodiversity resources were plundered by the
same government that was supposed to protect these resources. She informed that the same
government led by President Moi continued to use legal methods to achieve illegal means.
This is well exemplified by the attempts that were made to degazzet Karura Forest in 1998.
However, the regime abandoned its illegal development plans, which had seen large chunks of
the forest land chopped down and fenced off under legal notice Legal Notice 97/13.6.97 and
allocated to private developers. 377
We further note that in Kenya’s case, the politics of patronage adversely affected the
protection and investment in biological conservation and management. This was due to the
weakening state in the context of ethnically fragmented politics, based on ethnic and tribal
tenets. 378 This weakness was also manifested in the continued decline in institutions as well
as institutional management and enforcement agencies like the National Environmental
Management Authority, the Forest Department or the Ministry of Environment together with
the Kenya Wildlife Services. 379
It is worth noting that although these agencies are established under the act of Parliament to
conserve the national biological diversity, they were unfortunately caught in this web of
political patronage. Sadly, the same state institutions demonstrated failure wriggle themselves
out of pressures of this web. Fleuret who examined a similar scenario, noted that in the mid
eighties Kenyan masses moving into the common resources including parks and forest
reserved areas were sometimes a product of ethnic and tribal politics, spearheaded by the
KANU party strongmen. He goes ahead to inform that such movements ended up into ethnic
clashes which were used as an argument against multiparty democracy and pluralism at the
375
Wangari, M. 2005. Looking in a new Mirror. Nairobi:The Green Belt Movement.
376
Key Informant Interview with Prof. Wangari- Mathai Assistant Minister of Environment and Natural
Resources.14 May 2006.
377
Karura allocations Irreguar. The Daily Nation 2 Dec. 1998.
378
Key Informant interview with Prof.Wangari-Mathai, Assistant Minister of the Enviroment and Natural
Resource and 2004 Nobel Lauret.
379
Krhoda, G. 1998. What ails Kenya's policy on wildlife? Policy Insight 1(2):1-4.
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