By Daily Nation
Once upon a time, in one of my assignments as a budding journalist, I was privileged to tour a handful of districts, now counties, along the Kenyan northern frontier. Turkana was one of them. And over a decade later, I could still describe the features that defined the area rugged terrain, thorny shrubs, open swathes of fallow land, sparsely spread homesteads and the heavy sandy soil cover. It was a pastoral region where indigenous community members significantly depended on livestock. I learnt that their lifestyle was meticulously shaped by centuries-long mobility from one location to another in search of water and pasture for their herds. Their open land was a rangeland, that not fed their livestock, but also a symbol of the value of attachment to their homeland.
I recently returned to the county and to be welcomed by a fully-fledged town that Lodwar has become. I also travelled to Lokichar and saw first hand how the oil find has opened up the area to social and infrastructural development.
However, while residents in many areas close to the oil fields now have better access to social amenities, the discovery and extraction of oil has posed a great challenge to the people’s traditional grazing lands.
The corridors created to transport the crude oil, the flaring gas and the associated pollution have interfered with grazing patters and cycles. The anticipated construction of the 850km oil pipeline from the Lokichar oil wells to the Lamu port along the LAPSSET corridor is expected to run through potential migratory routs predominantly used by livestock during their movements in search for pasture and water. Read more>>
