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Plans for a mini-city
Had it been built to completion, Ruai Park Estate would have comprised 10,900 housing units worth a mouth-watering Sh15 billion funded by investors from the United Arab Emirates.
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It used to be a barren piece of land that had in the years past been at the centre of protracted battles
Then in 2014 an influential politician in government moved in and managed to bulldoze everyone out of the way and used his influence to have a police station set up
The officers from the East Park Police Station, as it is known, have for the past six years been harassing anyone who threatened to challenge the ownership of the land while offering protection to the contractor who was building the city.
“People here have died by just challenging the ownership of that land. It is not worth talking about it. Just see what you want to see and leave,” one of the IDPs living next to the property told us in August last year
On September 27, 2014, Mr Onesmus Mutinda, who was a surveyor in Ruai, was killed on the Ruiru Bypass.
His crime, according to the IDPs, was questioning the ownership of the 1,600-acre parcel, which by then was occupied by the IDPs.
Yesterday morning, the police officers guarding the property were overpowered by another contingent of about 300 officers mobilised from all the police divisions in Nairobi. The government had, after watching from the sidelines for three decades, come to take back its land.
The Ruai land, previously known as Juja Sisal Estate, was originally part of the expansive 16,000-acre Embakasi Ranching Company land and had been sold to the land-buying company in the 1970s by the Settlement Fund Trustee, a body that was administering land after independence
It was not until 1993 that the first raid on the land took place, when former Youth for Kanu chairman Cyrus Jirongo’s Offshore Trading Company was given part of the land, some 1,000 acres. Until recently, he was wooing some Arab investors into a joint Sh15 billion partnership
The only problem is that Mr Jirongo had no money and the land was already charged. The title had been with the Kenya Deposit Insurance Corporation (previously Deposit Protection Fund Board) of the Central Bank of Kenya after he used the land to secure for Sololo Outlets
The balance of the land was then fenced by a senior politician but under a company known as Renton. Mr Irungu said it is “a pity that the people who had taken the land are very senior.”
Jacob Juma called this out back in January 2015