Vast minerals under their feet, but Taita Taveta still languish in poverty

 June 21st 2013 By  Joe Kiarie
NAIROBI, KENYA: Is this the country’s best example of the resource curse? This  question haunts me after a tour of Taita Taveta County, which overflows with natural wealth.
The county boasts some of East Africa’s richest mineral deposits. It is also hemmed in between Kenya’s largest national parks, Tsavo East and Tsavo West, which earn the country billions of shillings annually from tourism.
Agriculture also thrives in Wudanyi and Taveta areas. But nothing in Taita Taveta, the third poorest county in Kenya, shows signs of this wealth.
Many residents live in poverty as labourers in sisal plantations and private farms or small-scale miners. The majority are squatters.

Taita Taveta has a heavily dilapidated road network and lags behind as far as education, medical services, water and power supply are concerned.
Services in Tanzania
Taveta town best illustrates the picture. With no reliable public and private health facilities, almost all residents seek medical services across the border in Tanzania.
“Taveta District Hospital is ill-equipped and cannot do a basic malaria diagnosis or attend to a broken limb,” says Mike Banto, a local farmer.
“We go to private hospitals in Tanzania, the most popular being Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, over 30 kilometres away. We are treated as foreigners and pay in dollars. This is all because our minerals have not been exploited and the little goes into our pockets.”
Most areas here are unreachable during rainy seasons.
Mr Ali Yusuf, the Teacher Service Commission ( TSC) District Staffing Officer in charge of Mwatate, says lack of transport, clean water, mobile network connectivity and health services, coupled with poor roads, pose a nightmare to teachers.
“Absenteeism and lateness are a serious issue here. Poverty levels are very high and this has affected every aspect of education,” says Yusuf.
At Kamtonga Primary School, the head teacher, Mr Samuel Mghanga, confirms the alarming poverty levels.
“This is too much. The nearest health facility is a dispensary seven kilometers away,” Mghanga says.
 He adds, “There is no electricity, commodity prices are very high while we have to cook with salty water from boreholes.”
While most of the parents in the arid areas are poor squattres who rely on small-scale mining and charcoal burning for subsistence, not even pupils have been left out.
“We always have pupils sneaking out of school to mine and sell gems,” Mghanga says, holding onto tools recently confiscated from three Standard Four pupils who were caught excavating tourmaline. The school had low mean score of 193.09 marks in last year’s KCPE.
Squattres drawn to illegal mining are not the only ones who have failed to benefit from the gemstones in the region. Even genuine landowners are unable to use the wealth.
Discovered gem
George Echu, for example, has prospected and discovered gems in every corner of his 15-acre piece of land. This wealth remains under his feet to be protected from thieves.
“I discovered traces of Tsavorite, yellow garnet and tourmaline in 2004, but have not been able to mine due to lack of proper equipment,” says the father of eight.
“If I had the right machinery, I don’t know where I would be today. There are millions, if not billions, of shillings under the soil on my land.”
For others, years of toil have ended in nothing but heartache. Others still let strangers bear the costs of prospecting then kick them out when fortune strikes. Some small-scale miners often labour for months – even years – prospecting for minerals.
But they are sometimes evicted from the mines by influential large-scale prospectors and land owners who claim legal ownership of the land as soon as the squatters discover gemstones.
Teresia Mukami has prospected for minerals at Mgeno ranch for the past 17 years, investing money in acquiring licenses and upkeep for her 27 employees.
“I recently found tourmaline and yellow garnet but was immediately arrested alongside my workers and locked up at Wundanyi Police Station,” she says. She has since been charged with trespassing.
 She produces several documents to support her claims, including a signed approval by the ranch manager.
No force of law
However, the ranch’s chairman, Mr Bong’osa Mcharo, says her private arrangements have no force of law.
“How could she claim to have a right to mine in my ranch when I don’t even know her?” he asks. “She had some letters, even one from a local chief. What does a chief have to do with licensing of prospecting on this land?”
Without modern mining equipment, many small-scale miners, most surviving on less than a dollar a day, spend lots of time, energy and resources prospecting in vain.
Mr Alexander Mwangeka, the County Executive in charge of Public Works, Roads, ICT, Housing, Energy and Transport docket, says the county is shouldering a national burden to add to historical injustices that have occasioned the squattre problem.
“Residents have no access to the billions of shillings earned from minerals that go into the pockets of a few influential people,” says Mwangeka.
Earnings from revenues
“While national parks earn over Sh3.5 billion annually, the Tsavos, which occupy 60 per cent of our land account for 40 per cent of the revenue but it all goes into State coffers. We must come up with strict laws to ensure locals benefits from resources around here.”
Eng Elijah Mwadoe, who is in charge of the Environment and Natural Resources docket, says the community might soon start benefiting once the Mining Bill is passed.
The Bill proposes that 75 per cent of all mining proceeds go to the national government, 20 per cent to the county government and five per cent to the local community.