The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) has been cleared of allegations of grave human rights violations including killings, forced disappearances of people, intentional “fueling” of ethnic conflict, and corruption, among others in northern Kenya.
An enquiry led by Dr Paul Kanyinke Sena, a Kenyan legal and human rights scholar and Director of the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee—a network of Indigenous People’s organisations in Africa, absolves the Trust of any wrongdoing and all the allegations in the Oakland report, saying it found that “none of the allegations levelled against NRT could concretely be substantiated.”
In November 2021, California-based think tank Oakland Institute published Stealth Game: ‘Community’ Conservancies Devastate Land & Lives in Northern Kenya, a scathing report that contained a range of allegations about the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) founded by Ian Craig and its member conservancies.
It accused security personnel attached to the conservancies of having committed extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances, and the administrators of the system of using corrupt means and coercion in the enlistment of community holdings for conservation, denying pastoral communities rights to their lands and livestock grazing rights in Isiolo, Samburu, Marsabit, and Laikipia counties.
Oakland claimed that as many as 70 Borana have been killed and others maimed in Samburu attacks aided by NRT or associated security operatives, in skirmishes linked to the evolution of the conservancy land management system there.
The interviewees of the Oakland report, that included Borana Council of Elders (BCE) and Waaso Professional Forum, had also accused NRT of failure to deliver promised benefits potentially accrued from the conservancies, taking of community lands, restricted access and monitoring of potential hotel/camp sites, undermining of the local Dheda grazing management system.
Dr Sena in the Due Diligence Report (DDR) released on Thursday, discounted the allegations as “unsupported and often demonstrably false…and collected from a small number of vocal critics, politicians and community leaders, in a complex political environment where attacks on NRT are widely understood as an electoral tactic”, apparently, after trying in vain to locate the allegedly directly impacted victims or their relatives, in field investigations done between March and May 2022.
The NRT is a donor-backed NGO founded in 2004 to promote the establishment of community conservancy areas.
NRT operates quasi-security units including the “9 units” who operate on a regional level under co-supervision and training by the National Police Service (NPS) and Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) primarily on anti-poaching and mitigating livestock theft.
NRT, through its security company 51 Degrees, also provides training. Further, each member conservancy has a staff and employs a team of uniformed scouts—currently 870 across—with team leaders operating as National Police Reservists (NPRs).
