Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

over the land that they have lived on for centuries.
Another problem is the failure to consult indigenous
communities when developing land rights policies.
Many indigenous communities have their own
local land practices that policymakers completely
disregard in the drafting of their frameworks for land
rights. The Samburu of Kenya, for example, use the
Lkiama system, which their ancestors developed
centuries ago. The Lkiama system states that all
tribal lands are collectively owned by the community
and entrusts them to a group of elders, who then
distribute them for use to the rest of the tribe. The
Samburu also negotiate directly with other tribes for
lands rights, outside of the jurisdiction of national
laws. The Kenyan government, however, did not take
the Lkiama system or these direct negotiations in
account when developing its new land policy, which
has led to dissention among the Samburu people.
131 Further problems with legal frameworks for local
land rights include overly complicated procedures
for securing these land rights, imprecision in the
definitions of who is entitled to local land rights, and
conflict over ownership of natural resources within
certain territories. 132
Upon removing indigenous populations from
ancestral lands, governments sometimes resettle
them on lands entirely unfamiliar to the populations.
For example, the Batwa people of Central Africa have
traditionally lived in the forests of Rwanda, Uganda,
Burundi, and the eastern part of the democratic
Republic of the Congo. In past few decades, these
governments have expelled the Batwa from their
lands because they wished to either undertake a
large infrastructural development program or form
a national park or nature reserve on the territory.
Currently, fewer than 10% of the Batwa still retain
access to traditional forest lands while the rest
have been resettled to villages on the periphery of
mainstream society. 133 These resettled citizens cannot
continue the forms of employment that they used to
undertake in the forest, and discrimination from the
majority ethnic group prevents them from obtaining
meaningful work. Most end up working as labor on
other people’s farms and have to borrow food in
order to survive. This entraps the Batwa people in a
cycle of debt from which they rarely escape. While
the populations of these African nations are rapidly
rising, the Batwa population is falling, most likely
because of the extreme poverty they face and the
subsequent lack of access to food and healthcare. 134
The problem of indigenous populations losing their
local land rights is not always forced upon them by
national governments. In some instances, immediate
economic pressures can encourage indigenous
peoples to sell their plots to whomever is willing to pay,
whether it be members of the majority population or a
dominant company. The Olkaria Maasai population of
Kenya, for example, live in Hell’s Gate National Park,
where the Kenya electricity Generating Company
(KenGen), a parastatal organization that produces
the vast majority of the electricity consumed in the
country, has been developing geothermal energy
since before the founding of the park in 1984. After a
long legal dispute, a Kenyan court ruled in 2009 that
the Maasai had rights to the land but, ignoring the
local land customs as discussed above, divided the
land into plots owned by individual members of the
Maasai tribe. While some have retained their land and
resumed traditional agricultural practices, KenGen
has bought out many others, paying them substantial
amounts for their individual titles. This issue has
brought significant intertribal violence and conflict to
the region, as those that do not sell were angry with
those that do. 135 Although it seems that the selling of
individual titles benefits the economic situations of
these Maasai, in the long run it will most likely leave
them in a worse position, as most of them do not
have the education or the skills for other occupations
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