Banditry in the Kerio Valley is a Community Investment

Paul Kipchumba

Monday 27 May 2019

To be at the receiving end of the reprimands of the Pokot and the Marakwet communities in the Kerio Valley is to utter a couple of statements:

(i) all residents of the Kerio Valley are bandits, save for the degree of banditry;

(ii) all bandits are community properties because since 1900 there is no bandit that has been handed to the government for prosecution;

(iii) there is no way that an illiterate and cashless bandit (except a few) can procure a gun, a hand grenade, and a bullet;

(iv) all dead bandits are community martyrs or heroes and are accorded a funeral honour, and all wounded bandits are supported by the communities; and

(v) all bandits in the Kerio Valley are normal citizens who transact with the government in very many ways and are known by the government.

The government is reluctant to stamp out banditry in the Kerio Valley because it will be tantamount to fighting a whole community; therefore, banditry in the Kerio Valley can only be ended by the two communities involved at their own time and of their own volition. There is already a lot of financial allocation from the national exchequer channeled to the two communities. But their local leaders and policy-makers are reluctant to invest the money in priority areas that can promote economic development in the Kerio Valley such as joint community agricultural and industrial projects, model joint settlements, joint churches and schools, among other innovative approaches.

In my view, the only hope for ending banditry in the Kerio Valley is to promote harmonious coexistence between the Pokot and the Marakwet. However, the beneficiaries of banditry have used it to impoverish the local communities in a way that will sustain a “handouts transactions economy” to guarantee re-election.

I grew up in the Kerio Valley and have researched widely among the Pokot and the Marakwet communities as exemplified by my latest paper “Prof. Wanjala in Culture Work: A Reflection on the Socio-Cultural Profiles of the Pokot and the Marakwet Communities” (Education Tomorrow - Kenya, Issue 5 number 1, January-April 2019). I have established that 70% of the local communities want to see a transformed Kerio Valley, whereas the remaining 30% want to continue using the 70% to champion their selfish interests centring around participation in local politics.

Thus there are two measures for ending banditry in the Kerio Valley: (i) encourage the two communities to fight a lot more until they realize the full picture of sustaining banditry in the Kerio Valley, and (ii) to eliminate the 30% who sustain it. And these are the choices that have put the national government security policy-makers in a dilemma.