Residents living in the disputed Mwea settlement scheme on Wednesday, January 17, 2024, staged peaceful demonstrations to present their petition to authorities over what they term a skewed subdivision of the land.
The residents in their hundreds who were drowned from the expansive land trucked more than 80 kilometres from where the land is located to the sub-county headquarters in Karaba to present their petition.
While speaking when they handed over their petition to the office of the deputy county commissioner in the area the locals said they were locked out when the land was being subdivided and are now calling for a fresh subdivision and issuance of the title deeds.
Led by Makima ward Member of County Assembly(MCA) the locals said they won’t allow any effort to evict them from their ancestral land.
Nzangi Kinyutu noted that people who should not have been given the title deeds were the ones owning big parcels of land and the locals were left landless. He called on the government to expedite the process of coming up with an amicable solution to solve the stalemate surrounding the land.
The county legislator stated both the local leaders and the residents were open to deliberations that would see the issue resolved.
Further, he urged the government to operationalize the sub-county land board so that the locals can have their issues sorted out from that area.
“We are ready to solve this issue and now the government should open gates for us,” he said.
Boniface Kawaya a resident in the area said the land in question has schools and other government entities and thus this was the high time government brought development in the area since they have been marginalised for years.
He said no one was ready to leave the land since that is the area they have called home for decades thus calling on the government to consider giving them their title deeds.
Elizabeth Mwongeli said there was fraud subdivision of the land calling on the government to investigate those who were issued with the title deeds and have an overhaul of the whole process.
On the other hand, Benson Mutungi alleged that some government officials had been issued with title deeds and that the list of beneficiaries should be made public.
Assistant County Commissioners Wanjiru Muthuri and Floridah Ntwiga received the memorandum on behalf of the DCC and assured them that their grievances would be looked into though the process may take time.
The allocations triggered riots in the scheme in 2018 when the residents discovered some of their neighbours had been left in the allocations.
