Armed police raided a village in Olkaria Naivasha and evicted over ten families to pave way for geothermal exploration.
During the Friday night incident, emotions ran high as the families who were caught by surprise watched their personal effects reduced to ashes.
The incident comes barely a week after Kengen relocated 110 families from the geothermal rich area to pave way for exploration of more power.
The families complained that some of their kin had not being factored in the resettlement exercise and refused to be resettled.
According to one of the affected, Johana Amucen Evuan, the security officers accompanied by Kengen officers moved in without notice.
He said that the families were in a list that was to be resettled by Kengen but they did not understand how their names were struck off in the last minute.
“The exercise caught us by surprise as there was no notice and we were waiting for compensation or the way forward over our resettlement,” he said.
Evuan said that during the incident, some of their livestock went missing and efforts to trace them had been fruitless.
He said that they would take the issue with senior government officers over the manner they were evicted from their ancestral land.
“We have lived on this land for over fifty years and we condemn the inhumane manner in which were evicted without notice,” he said.
Contacted on phone, Naivasha sub-county commissioner Abraham Kemboi downplayed the incident.
He said that those manyattas demolished belonged to families that had been resettled by Kengen last week as part of the 280MW project.
“The demolished manyattas houses were left behind by the resettled families to pave way for geothermal exploration and they were been cleared for the works to start,” he said.
Kemboi added that all families in the area had been resettled and given new houses, churches and a school as part of their compensation.
-The Star
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