Kenya: Church leads calls for return of stolen land

The Catholic Justice and Peace Commission in Kitale Diocese has held a peaceful demonstration to pressurize the government to release the findings of a commission on grabbed land in the country. Led by their Coordinator, Fr Gabriel Dolan SPS, on Saturday, the demonstrators asked the government to act fast and repossess all stolen land in the country as the only way to reduce the high levels of poverty in the country. "We need to scrutinize the contents of the report before the formation of a national land policy," said Fr Dolan, adding that the government was provoking Kenyans to violence by not releasing the findings. The Presidential Commission of Inquiry Into Illegal/Irregular Allocation of Public Land was chaired by Nairobi lawyer Paul Ndung'u, hence the common reference to 'the Ndung'u Report'. Fr Dolan, a member of the Society of St Patrick's Missionary Society (Kiltegans), warned that the church would lead people to invade grabbed land if the government will not have acted by the end of the year. The Chairman of the Kenya national Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), Maina Kiai, who was the guest of honour at the function, said that his commission had given Lands minister Amos Kimunya a two-week deadline to release the report. "The government must stop fighting corruption selectively and handle all cases of injustice with the same magnitude," he said. The coordinator of Kenya Land Alliance, Mr Odenda Lumumba -and who also sat in the Ndung'u Commission- threatened to release a parallel report before the end of the year if the government failed to act. (Source: CISA)