The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  There is a new player in the battle for Yala swamp. The Kenya Wildlife Service, a powerful government agency, has declared part of the swamp a conservation area. There were hopes that might stall further expansion of the farm. It should. A draft conservation plan, drawn up by scientists from the British government’s Darwin Initiative to help Kenya meet its obligations for the swamp under international law, called for a cessation of further drainage for agriculture. Drains had “eroded the ecological and socio-economic values and services derived from Yala swamp.” The researchers called instead for “restoration and rehabilitation,” noting that “traditional uses that are less destructive allowed the wetland a chance to thrive, but this is no longer possible given the advent of mechanized agriculture.”

  So far, however, the Wildlife Service has not heeded this, and is drawing up its own conservation plan with Dominion. “They want to drain half the swamp and turn the rest into a game park,” Ongwek told me. It looks like the final indignity for the locals. The theft of their swamp will be complete.

  Rather than curbing Dominion’s annexation of the swamp, the Wildlife Service has been dispatching police to apprehend locals. A few days before I visited, they had arrested Charles Nyango for cultivating a piece of swamp near the Lake Kanyaboli causeway. Ongwek took me to meet Nyango at the crime scene. “We were beaten and taken to the police station. We were charged with burning papyrus and resisting arrest,” he said. “Yes, we were cultivating a protected area,” he agreed. But then he pointed down the road. We were standing only a couple of hundred yards from where Dominion’s green-liveried John Deere heavy equipment was at that moment clearing land. There was no sign of Dominion employees being arrested. It was plain injustice, he said. “We’ve been farming here a long time. Who is doing the real damage? Who is burning hundreds of acres of papyrus here? Dominion.”

  Ongwek had one more thing to show me before we left. He pulled from his raincoat a sheet of paper, with an official-looking stamp. It was a permit he had obtained the day before from Yaswa Security Services, which works for Dominion. The permit read: “To whom it may concern. Allow John Atieno [Ongwek], the community chairman Siaya district, to pass along with visitors to Daraja and back today, the 15th February 2011. This has been authorised by the farm manager Mr Ronald.” The road looked to me like a public road. It was outside the farm fence. I had been driving freely down it. But Ongwek said the local villagers needed written permission to go there. It seemed more like one of Burgess’s old prisons than the plains of Africa.

  Clearly there are winners and losers from the American’s evangelistic land grab. Burgess is impatient to do good. His blogs are full of his virtuous deeds, whether showering beneficence on his farm employees, feeding orphans, or recruiting prostitutes as rice saleswomen in Nairobi and Kampala. The company can claim that its investment is in some degree helping to create some of the new wealth visible in nearby towns. There are more bicycles and tin roofs. Siaya has new banks and a shopping complex. Some locals have been offered the chance to sell products from the farm. “Poverty levels are down—from 85 percent to 60 percent because of the money we are putting into the economy,” says Burgess.

  But clearly too, other income from harvesting the swamp’s natural resources has been lost. People need money now to buy the things the swamp can no longer provide. And this is not just about money, it is about land and identity and dignity. Enos Were, one of Burgess’s local office staff, told me that “some people who moved from their flooded area left their hearts there. But we compensated them. The people are better off. They were barefoot before Calvin came.”

  That doesn’t cut much ice with Chris Owalla, a Kisumu sociologist who had recently helped form a network of NGOs, the Friends of Yala Swamp, that wants people to map and claim their ancestral lands. “How do you measure the value of land to people?” he asked. “In any case, you can’t just say that if people don’t take the compensation you will come with the police and flood their land. People have rights, whether or not they have title. They should draw up their own plans for the swamp—with or without Dominion.”

  In law, the swamp is held in trust for the communities that live there by the two county councils in the area, Siaya and Bondo. But, so far as I could see, the counties did not consult the locals about their needs, and were only interested in extracting rent from the farm. Over the first twenty-five years, that should amount to 15 million Kenyan shillings, or $175,000. But, because of boundary disputes, the councils can’t agree who should get what. Perhaps embittered by this, Bondo county clerk Silas Odhiambo told me almost before I had sat down in his office: “Dominion should shut down. They don’t consult. They just do their own things.”

  Bondo council also claims that some of the rent due to Siaya went into a bank account in Kisumu, which mysteriously emptied. It is hard to know the truth of these stories. But Dominion says it paid the cash, and the Siaya administration says it never received it.

  Siaya’s officials could not find anyone to talk to me, but I met their councillor for much of the swamp and its part of Dominion Farm, Leonard Oriaro. He was new and becoming disillusioned. He said his fellow councillors did not take their duties as trustees of the swamp seriously. “They are looters, and they make problems for me because I am not. Now my electors are getting upset with me because I can’t change anything. I don’t think I will get elected again.”

  The story of Yala swamp shows how even outsiders with the best of intentions can create severe problems. Dominion Farms is not engaged in a crude corporate takeover of the land, as imagined by some NGOs. It is hardnosed, but also philanthropic in intent. At the start, Burgess received bags of goodwill through his Christian networks and government contacts. Local NGOs were not initially hostile. The extreme local poverty encouraged women in particular to work for him in sometimes distressing conditions. You might say that if Burgess can’t make this kind of development work, through sheer force of personality and invoking the will of God, then who can?

  Smart locals can see that ultimately the farm can probably only succeed if Burgess and his white managers disappear, and it stands alone as an African project. “In Africa, there is so much history from the colonial ties,” his black lieutenant Abir told me over lunch before I left, more in sorrow than anger. “When a white man comes in, it looks like they want to take the land again. People are suspicious. But they also have high expectations. And they expect handouts: an extra dollar from the white man. Then when something goes wrong—which of course it does—they say he is just like the rest and the project will fail.”

  Abir told me that he longs for the time when the farm’s bosses are Kenyan rather than American. He e-mailed me a few weeks later to say proudly that Boone’s replacement as farm manager was a black African who had worked on the farm for several years. Perhaps it can succeed. Perhaps Burgess will be vindicated and his Dominion will be successfully established. But the skepticism was summed up for me by a bemused local outside the farm fence, who said something I heard many times while researching this book. “If it all goes wrong, or if they lose interest, they just go home. We have to stay. This is our land.”

  A few months later, the situation deteriorated further, when police evicted villagers from a disputed area of the farm. Councillor Leonard Oriaro was arrested for incitement after he took the villagers’ side. And when Burgess showed up, angry villagers chased him with knives. He complained to the police that he feared for his life.

  Even before then, Burgess had seemed to me less taken with his mission of saving the people of the Yala swamp than he had once proclaimed. When I interviewed him, he was about to head off to the new state of South Sudan to find land. I heard no more about that. But shortly after being chased by the Yala villagers, he popped up in Nigeria. He said he was in the final stages of acquiring 75,000 acres of a swamp in Taraba state with the blessing of the former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo. He planned a new rice farm several
times the size of the Yala operation.

  Like Yala, the swampland was a moribund old state farm. Local reporters said he told them the Taraba land “looks more attractive” than his Kenyan dominion. The chief of the local Gassol people said the project would be “a blessing” to his people. All it needs now is a white cross.

  Chapter 6. Liberia: The Resource Curse

  On top of the highest hill in Monrovia, there is a large statue of Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the first president of Liberia, the West African nation created almost two centuries ago as a homeland for freed American slaves. Around the statue is a black frieze showing new arrivals in Africa’s land of the free, resplendent in frock coats, and shaking hands with local chiefs in native dress. They are surrounded by trees in what looks like a verdant bush clearing. That is the founding story of Liberia: two groups of noble black men, with different pasts but a shared common future, meeting in peace in an African Garden of Eden. A shame it didn’t work out like that.

  These days, Roberts looks out on a fractured nation. Over the hill, beyond the bombed-out water reservoir, is “UN Drive.” Here, a phalanx of international agencies, including 15,000 peacekeeping soldiers from the United Nations, have been trying to help Liberia recover from fourteen years of civil war that wrecked its fragile infrastructure and traumatized its people.

  It was a war in which the natives and the elite descendents of the interlopers, still known as Americo-Liberians, mostly took different sides. It was also a war sustained by chopping down many of the trees that shaded their first meeting almost two centuries ago. The Garden of Eden that the freed slaves thought would bring wealth has instead brought trouble. Liberia, many say, is a prime example of the “resource curse,” in which those who exploit natural riches bring not wealth, but conflict, plunder, and poverty. It is certainly a salutary warning to those who think foreign investment is a surefire winner for distressed African nations.

  Liberia is unique in Africa. It is the creation not of European colonialists but of American philanthropists, who formed the American Colonization Society to establish an “ideal state” for freed slaves in the continent of their ancestors. The first eighty-six ex-slaves landed on the thinly inhabited “Pepper Coast” of West Africa in 1820. With some armed threats, they soon succeeded in “buying” 30 miles of the coast from a local chief. Within a few years, some three thousand of them had colonized the coastal strip and created four settlements. In 1847, they declared the state of Liberia, including everything within 200 miles of the coast.

  The natives were not consulted and were excluded from citizenship in the new republic. The first land laws said they could not own land until they became civilized. They mostly didn’t. They continued to live in the forests, clearing patches for shifting cultivation, orchards, and kitchen gardens. Their rebellions against the invaders were short-lived, in part because the natives came from dozens of competing ethnic groups. The Grebo rebelled in 1893 and the Kru in 1915.

  Numerically, the colonists were always in a tiny minority. Today, their descendents comprise less than 3 percent of the Liberian population. But for more than a century, they ran the country, often treating the natives with disdain. The League of Nations found that during the 1920s the government forcibly shipped natives to work on Spanish-owned plantations on the West African island of Fernando Po. How strange that freed slaves should be so willing to visit the same abuse on others. But the United States provided financial support and encouraged the settlers’ policy of handing over the interior and its resources to foreign companies so they could extract timber and minerals, and create plantations. The prime example of this system was the million-acre land grab by Firestone for a rubber plantation, created in 1926. By the 1950s, Firestone accounted for almost half the national economy.

  This Americo-Liberian hegemony collapsed in 1980 when Samuel Doe, a member of the Krahn people of the interior who had trained with U.S. Army Special Forces, seized power in a coup d’état. He executed President William Tolbert, arrested hundreds of Americo-Liberians, and declared himself the country’s first indigenous president. His rule was a disaster. He and his fellow Krahn officers set about seizing the country’s precious resources for themselves. In the end, almost everyone other than the Krahn was against him, and he was deposed by his former colleague Charles Taylor.

  Taylor proved even worse. He had been sacked by Doe in 1983 for embezzling a million dollars. He fled to the United States, where he had banked his lucre. There he was arrested, but escaped while awaiting extradition to Liberia. He claims his escape was with the assistance of the U.S. government. He subsequently fled to Libya, where he was given guerrilla training by Colonel Gaddafi before recruiting a rebel army that crossed into Liberia in 1989. Taylor’s takeover triggered a wider conflict that lasted for fourteen years, during which half the country fled as ethnic warlords battled for the country’s resources as much as the president’s palace.

  Under Taylor, timber and terror went together. In the early days, he sold logging rights in areas he controlled in return for cash to buy arms. When he had assumed the reins of government, his brother Demetrius (“Bob”) Taylor did the same as head of the Forestry Development Authority. A UN study found that 86 percent of the country’s fast-expanding timber production was controlled by arms traders. Land grabbers turned into gun runners.

  One unlikely forester was a notorious Ukrainian mafia boss, Leonid Minin, whose Exotic Tropical Timber Enterprise also traded in arms and diamonds. Another was Guus van Kouwenhoven, a Dutch adventurer whose colorful past included a 1970s conviction in Los Angeles for trying to sell stolen Rembrandt paintings. He moved to Liberia, where he imported luxury cars and owned the swanky Hotel Africa with its popular casino. Everyone knew him as “Mr. Gus.” By the 1990s, Mr. Gus was a confidant of Taylor, and in 1998 he mysteriously became president of a logging company known as Oriental Timber.

  Oriental Timber had no apparent interest in Liberia until Mr. Gus. But, helped no doubt by his seat on the Forest Development Authority, he turned it into by far Liberia’s largest timber operation, with logging rights to more than 2 million acres, a quarter of Liberia’s forests. The company, which claimed at the time to be Malaysian, brought some six hundred loggers from Asia, and even flew in fresh teams of prostitutes every two months.

  Oriental Timber shipped hardwood out of Buchanan, a port with some thirty thousand inhabitants that is Liberia’s third-largest city. The docks, which included an export terminal for up-country iron mines, covered more than a square mile during those boom years. But today they are a ghost town, with rusting equipment everywhere, including Oriental’s old sawmill. Mr. Gus’s timber went from Buchanan to France and China, and the ships came back loaded with guns. After being cleared of war crimes, and acquitted on appeal of selling weapons to Taylor, van Kouwenhoven is currently awaiting a retrial.

  Men like Mr. Gus and Minin did very well out of plundering Liberia’s precious timber. But so did Taylor, who had stumbled on a system for getting timber companies to fund his warlord economy. Investigators after the war uncovered a check for almost $2 billion dated July 2000 from one of Oriental Timber’s subsidiaries, Natural Holdings, and made out to Charles G. Taylor’s personal checking account.

  The NGO Global Witness, which investigated the imbroglio, named other timber companies with Liberian logging concessions at the time. They included the Royal Timber Company, with Mr. Gus as a director; the Inland Logging Company, run by Taylor’s associates Maurice and Oscar Cooper; the Mohammed Group of Companies, owned by Mohammed Salame, who was Taylor’s ambassador-at-large in Cote d’Ivoire; and Maryland Wood Processing Industries, owned by a local Lebanese businessman, Abbas Fawaz. Fawaz was required to pay a local commander for “security,” while the commander press-ganged and massacred more than three hundred civilians.

  The tragedy was that the international community allowed this situation to continue for years. People in the country could
see what was going on. A British diplomat told journalists in Monrovia in 2001 that “it is the timber trade that is keeping Taylor in power.” But the world was reluctant to ban Liberian timber. And as a result, the UN failed in its efforts to broker a peace in a civil war that by now was often being fought by children.

  Only in May 2003 did the UN Security Council impose a trade embargo on Liberia’s “logs of war.” The effect was instant. By August it was all over. Deprived of Taylor’s timber revenues, the regime collapsed, the land grabbers departed, and Taylor fled to Nigeria. With a UN military peacekeeping presence, new elections were held in 2005. They brought to power Harvard-trained, U.S.-backed Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. She won two elections, brought much-needed stability and security, and stemmed the ransacking of the country’s resources. But extreme poverty and economic stagnation persisted. Without revenues, government coffers were empty. The dilemma for her administration was that to restart the economy, she needed to tap the country’s most salable resource—the same forests that had sustained a vicious fourteen-year civil war that left 150,000 dead. Could the resource curse be broken?

  Despite the depredations of the civil war, forests still cover 45 percent of Liberia. They are home to the world’s only viable population of pygmy hippos, as well as the indigenous Liberian mongoose, Diana monkey, and Jentink’s duiker, and West Africa’s largest population of forest elephants. The new government has promised to set aside more than 2 million acres for conservation, but it wants the rest to earn its keep.