This is the thing that will put a final nail on the political coffin on WSR. Without land reforms, Rift Valley has no future and peace is a mirage. By opting out of the constitution debate by ODM, WSR and the gang will be choosing to side with the forces that undermine the pursuit of long-lasting peace in the RVP.
By either voting against or refusing to support the Orengo land reforms, he will be choosing his friends. Those friend, I am afraid, are not the poor peasants of the RVP. He alone knows their identity.
Ruto is walking down a beaten road to historical oblivion. On that road travelled DTM. DTM befriended Kenyatta, rubbished progressive Kalenjin leaders like Jean-Marie Seroney and Taaita Toweet. As a reward he was corrupted with free land. Consequently, having bent backwards Nyakinyua settled in the RVP's most remote regions. Those regions, like Meteitei in Tinderet, were the first ones to bear the brunt of tribal clashes in 1992, Moi's effort to reverse the settlements. The pain and trauma of those clashes live on to this day, Moi is not bothered.
Ruto is siding with Jomo's son, as did Moi with Jomo, in order to defeat the distribution of land. As said elsewhere on this forum: There is too much idle land in the hands of a few, while so many have little land. That imbalance, even if you use the Pareto Principal, is unjustified.
As MKW would say, the die is cast.
The story: Moi was corrupted with free land, allowed Gikuyu settlement in the Rift; that post-Moi Gikuyu settlement (or Moi's attempt to reverse it) is the cause of the violence.
That's just false. The bulk of the settlements happened before Moi became VP -- the Gikuyu proportion of the Rift Valley's population has remained more or less the same since 1962 -- and the usual story is that he got masses of land after he became VP. But he only became Vice-President in 1967.
It can't be true that the grants of land to Moi caused the presence of Gikuyu which then caused the violence. If it's the grants of land to Moi that are the trigger, they happened long after there were Gikuyu in the Rift Valley, so it's not obvious why it should have been felt necessary to slaughter Gikuyu peasants. If it's the Gikuyu presence that caused the violence, then that preceded Moi, and therefore his appointment and corruption, so it's unclear why it was felt necessary to blame Moi.
(And the claim about land as the trigger for violence is the reddest of red herrings. Much of the violence in the Rift Valley consisted in the eviction of small businessowners, traders, workers and so on. Those aren't people who own land -- or even the premisses from which they work -- it's hard to think of folk who pick tea or flowers on plantations in the Rift Valley as landowners. If the choice of the victims were determined by land ownership, you wouldn't expect them to be attacked. Nonetheless, they were. Land is the least of the Rift Valley's worries.)
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