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According to MRG’s Kenyan partner organizations there have been incidents of ethnically targeted killings including against people from the Kikuyu ethnic group to which President Mwai Kibaki belongs to. Many people have also been forced out of their homes.
“MRG strongly condemns this ethnically targeted violence that has killed so many people and threatens the lives of thousands more. But we must not forget that the smaller minority communities in Kenya have been reeling with political and socio-economic grievances for many years,” Mark Lattimer, MRG’s Executive Director says.
MRG’s partner groups have warned that minorities and indigenous groups who live in the poorest areas in Kenya are likely to be seriously affected by the current violent climate in the country that has caused a collapse of the transport system and has left some areas crippled with food and medicine shortages.
In 2005 a MRG report said that Minorities and indigenous peoples in Kenya feel excluded from the economic and political life of the state. They are poorer than the rest of Kenya’s population, their rights are not respected and they are rarely included in development, or other participatory planning processes, the report said.
http://www.minorityrights.org/?lid=4619
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Kenya: Minorities, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Diversity
13 April 2005
A4, 44pp, ISBN 1 904584 24 1
Minorities and indigenous peoples in Kenya feel excluded from the economic and political life of the state. They are poorer than the rest of Kenya’s population, their rights are not respected and they are rarely included in development, or other participatory planning processes.
This report discusses the abuse of ethnicity in Kenyan policies, arguing that ethnicity is a card all too often used by Kenyan politicians to favour certain communities over others in the share of the nation’s wealth. Kenya: Minorities, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Diversity exposes these concerns in detail via the analysis of budgetary allocations in the poor Turkana region, which is dominated by the minority Turkana people, and in the richer Nyeri region, home of Kenya’s current President. The author, Maurice Odhiambo Makoloo, calls for immediate action to address the inequalities and marginalization of communities, as a way of ensuring that Kenya remains free of major conflict. It calls for disaggregated data – by ethnicity and gender – and a new Constitution to devolve power away from the centre, so that minority and indigenous peoples stand to benefit from current and new development programmes.
The report argues that Kenya’s diversity should be its strength and need not be a threat to national unity. Suppressing and denying ethnic diversity is the quickest route to inter-ethnic conflict and claims of secession. The report calls for urgent action on data collection, and land and education, to ensure that existing ethnic tensions do not explode into ethnic violence.
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