The Fight For Water - Kenya's Cattle Wars | Giving Nature A Voice | Free Documentary Nature

[Music] [Music] huh [Music] oh if you want one of those frameable memories of kenya's astounding natural beauty visit the aberdeer rangers they'll knock you out [Music] but like many other things in kenya its beauty and the usefulness of the rivers that spring from here shouldn't be taken at face value the abiders have quenched our thirst as a country for millennia it's what ties all kenyans together if you think about it this water pillar feeds the cities it feeds our countrysides and it feeds our pastural communities downstream from here but this wonderful looking waterfall and a many that's around it here in the aberdare ranges is hiding something from you the waters that flowed down from the aberdeers aren't reaching where they used to and that means that a disaster is on the horizon for the pastoral communities that depend on the river that flows from the aberdeers the iowa nero my name is john allen i'm a kenyan investigative reporter and i'm on a journey i'm following these streams down from where they start high above most of kenya down to where they joined to form one of northern kenya's most iconic rivers the iwasongiro but the story i'm looking for is about the people who depend on it from when the river is full to the beginning of the worst drought in 10 years i want to understand the story behind the drying up river and the conflict that comes when the river ends i will fight with a panga with a spear with my own teeth no day i live here and i have told my sons why seven none should leave this place they should better perish because i got there from this soil and i have to fertilize this oil again mount kenya is here and their burdens is here mount kenya and they are badess ranges where we have got these water towers okay is we are already the cloud systems are based okay and remember these are the regions which are feeding the whole of this region and even they feed lake victoria and some of this water also feeds to the indian ocean okay so in the absence or in the presence of the climate change and things now change here they will certainly change the lifestyle of virtually everybody in this area between the months of october 2016 and april 2017 all forecasts have shown that kenya will be in the middle of one of the worst droughts in almost 10 years but because it's hot now many of us kenyans will have forgotten that just a year earlier this was one of the wettest periods in almost a decade [Music] we were in the middle of el nino a weather phenomenon characterized by very high amounts of rainfall in particular if you look at the el nino phenomenon we know that we had an el nino phenomenon in 2015 which and that was as strong as the one we had in 97 and 98 these are two very strong el ninos so what we're now seeing we've seen the tale of that we had a failure in the short range last year and it is very likely i think the forecasters that the long range will also be affected it is part of the phenomenon for a long time now in kenya we've seen reports of the effects of drought in some of the driest parts of our country which is over 70 percent of kenya's land mass rainfall levels in december were too low to reverse the dry spell and counties a devastating drought is swelling through the northern southern and eastern parts of the country what is being described as a wasted route to heat the country since 2011. in september 2009 during the last la nina period i reported on one effect of drought violence a serious interclan conflict over pasture in what is now is yolo county kenya's geographical center and a gateway to the north it always bothered me that beyond going to the battleground then i never really heard the stories of those fighting i've come back exactly eight years later this time around to hear the stories of the people who over the course of the droughts unfolding will be the hardest hit by extreme weather i start at archer's post a trading post where most of these yolo's communities like the borana the turkana and the samburu meet it's a livestock market day people come from far away it's a good time to make a sale grass and water are still available so most of the animals here are healthy and will fetch a good price but this is the tail end of the good times already water levels in the osonido river are looking quite low i want to hear what local herders are thinking about the times ahead [Music] i'm introduced to la tiriman letwa we meet at the noisy mouth of the he agrees to take us into samburu county where a group of his friends are herding their family's livestock and the further into our trip we get the drier and harsher the landscape begins to look and the search for water is on this village on our way to lottery man's friends is a perfect example of what happens when grass around the homestead is no longer available apple husband is already out with their families head she's been left behind with their four children although it's about a month earlier than she had expected him to leave [Music] him is have been driving their cattle deep into samburu county along the wasongiro back in nairobi hydrologist dr sean avery who's been studying kenya's water system since 1979 told me why they'd be going in this direction this is a picture of the basin which you're familiar with showing the lorian swamp this this is a magnet because when you look at the the basin there and you see where the water goes in the dry periods traditionally the samburu have always moved into areas where there's no this pasture these areas here collect water from the matthews range from the endothose from the milgauss lager from the wasangara as well but a lot of it comes in from these other areas so that basin there is is a base in which all these pastoralists know about they come down the north to come from all directions to exploit those resources around here owasungiro feeds into a large catchment area north of iciolo called the loryan swamp for hundreds of years this area has been a grass bank for the samburu the burana the somali and the turkana communities and the iwasongiro feeds this grass bank but at this time a lot less water from the owasoniro is feeding into it actually we look at what's a new river the volumes of the neural river over the years has been actually going down or going low this is because of one there has been poor uh what is called say a drainage in terms of feed because this was a neural river depends on the other feeder rivers but if it does not go there it means actually death it takes us nearly a day's driving to get to lottery man's friends for any herder this would be a sight for sore eyes healthy herds in their hundreds [Music] driven by tens of young herders some of whom are well armed just a few meters away though is evidence that the river is drying up faster than usual it's still early in the dry season but these young herders will be pushing up further north to areas where other communities are grazing up north where they're headed the borana and the samburu have fought before and it's been deadly in 2015 alone 310 people were killed in inter-tribal clashes in northern kenya according to the united nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs samburu where i met lottery man and this yolo are two of the five hot spots most of the men here are well armed but are unsure about who we are and keep their guns well hidden but when we settle down in the evening there's no sign of tension about our presence there dinner is prepared in a flash and we all get to eat after the head of the group of these morans jumma le chiquet gets his share even if we paid for the goat at dawn everyone is up and ready to go again here in one of the many crowds of the samburu the cows are fat and very healthy and i suspect the crowds of many other communities here along these planes will be the same it's been a good rainy season and they've been all able to restock but we're coming to the end of the good times here and with the end of the good times grass starts to thin water becomes in short supply and competition for those resources becomes even more tense and with that tension becomes violence that often many people can't resolve and die from [Music] these morons will graze their heads here a little longer before pushing up northwards towards borana territory juma the moran's leader knows that diplomacy will be very important as they go forward foreign seasons are changing here tough times are ahead but is that all that's changing if one looks at the population statistics for kenya one of the things that is very striking is that the population growth rates in the dry lands is much higher than anywhere than the national average in the country so although these areas are resource strapped they have a finite limited resource by virtue of the fact that they are dry lands the irony is they've been put under much more disproportionate pressure by virtue of very significant increases in human population according to the last census the populations in westpocot turkana samburu and siolo are growing at 5 almost double the national average with bigger families more and different kinds of livestock are needed and water is getting harder to come and his boys walking into an uncertain few months ahead as they wait for a rainy season that forecasters have said will be delayed i come back in late october when the rain is supposed to start falling this time we head into borana territory [Music] we start at a shallow well in kinah there's nothing shallow about it anymore with the rains delaying people have to go deeper and deeper to get water but he's holding out hope that the rains will fall soon we're deep into october at this time two weeks past the estimated period when the rains were supposed to fall it's a turn of his cattle and goats to drink at the trough with so many people here hoping to keep their animals alive everyone has to respect order and it's order that hajj hopes will keep communities from fighting a respected elder here in kinah he's been part of the team that negotiated the modogasha declaration an agreement between the communities living in east yolo about where to graze the declaration isn't holding very well we're already hearing murmurs about some cattle that was stolen and no one's taking any chances [Music] [Music] [Music] hajj had to drive his cattle 17 kilometers just to get here and as i go deeper into burana territory i see clearly just how desperate the search is getting if ever there was a symbol of how badly this region needs water then this is it this is or was the gree saddam a water pan that would gather the people of visciolo county towards it so promising it was that when they'd come here to quench their thirst all those 10 years ago when the government built this dam the government also set up a chief's office here settlements started to come up it looked as if this region would finally turn around its fortunes with regard to the lack of water but years and years of drought had made sure that where i'm standing now where water would reach about my waste would eventually shrink and shrink further from the edges of this dam and finally go into the ground and all that's left are cracks [Music] the fault lines in inter-tribal relationships here are getting deeper as well hussein below would know he's the head of the kenya police reservists in the area and has just come back from resolving a wrestling dispute between the barana and the samburu so this shouldn't be taken as a small victory it's progress considering that all the communities here are very well armed the reaction to this theft could have gone very differently three times [Music] [Music] hussein is often at the front lines of clashes between communities trying to separate them when things get violent he points us in the direction of a place where mediation came too late she had no livestock no goat no cow no coming she had nowhere to go it was so painful and it had salisa farole invites me into his home just as dusk settles in he lives in gafarza a small oasis village on the border between iciolo and garissa county it's an attractive place for the communities around it because it has grass and water a few weeks ago that blessing became celesta's family's curse herders said to be from the somali community came marauding one night celesta's 82 year old mother and his 11 year old nephew were the first ones they found in their path now while they are men of my age men manual younger than me who can be part of the conflict are there they killed a mother of 82. my own mother they tied her this way and they shot from point blank from the left side to the right side there was no confrontation my mother aspar today have got only three three young men she has never had a boy none of us and they can bear witness they know us all none of us have ever never went we are friends with them all they communicate to us and they tell us who did what then the question is why did they kill a mother then came a young boy with standard 1 11 years a child of 11 years you thai at such a painful death this is recurrent now they want this war not to end this conflict to go on sales pain brings back memories from his childhood another period of drought there was that time in the shift of war my mother gave back to me that time i can recall i suckled my mother because she had no livestock for three hundred years for three and a half years and it's dominated by somebody god will forbid and think i feel that other egyptian men don't suck your mothers i had to leave her by then i was in duksy i was reading the quran i was as small as i was going to doxi she had to come i suck up go until the other boys were laughing at me and then somebody who lives across just just across the town just forget it i'm sorry i'm very sorry don't mind it's life it's life she had no livestock no good no cow no coming she had nowhere to go she has no other way she has to tell to say she better perish and then i should leave and then somebody comes and terminates her life and then he expects to live in a comfort life no way i tell you no way and i can tell anybody no way he is sure that his mother's killers wanted to start a war between the two communities with the land celestia's community sits on as a prize the strong one will will be staying and the weekend will perish do you think that your community is ready to give up this land i i don't think if only my daughter is as small as she is if only i have that daughter i cannot leave this place i will fight i will fight with a panga with a spear with my own teeth no day i live here and i have told my sons what seven none should leave this place they should better perish because i got them from this soil and i will i'll have to fertilize this oil again at the edge of the village i meet celeste's younger brother rasheed abdi call to prayer sounds just as we approach his mother and his son's graves i asked him whether he'd be willing to forgive the men who did this and i get more than i bargained for in his answer says he knows the people who killed his son and his mother and that little has happened to find them shocks me and stays with me [Music] i leave him to grieve a while longer it's been a very confusing day for me where on the one hand you hear reassuring stories about how communities can come together to resolve things but then we just come from the homestead and the graves of two brothers who've lost a mother and a son all in the space of one evening when another community attacked them and it just shows you that the culture of ethnic domination of violence especially around the issues of land and of grazing pasture are still very deeply ingrained in the communities here those deaths i don't think are going to go unpunished at least from the point of view of that community and that's what worries [Music] from every direction it looks like communities are under pressure and getting more aggressive something needs to happen to cool things down then after weeks of waiting something does happen it rains [Music] back in iciolo on the second day of the rains i pull ludman lel calculi the head of the drought management authority outside so that we can experience the first drops of rain in this region late as they are shouldn't we be happy i mean this is what the second day that we've seen rain back here shouldn't we be happy that this is this has now come actually i would say we should be happy but again we are supposed to be to see ourselves and this is the second day but uh according to the prediction that we are we are facing is that we are actually going to the this short range will be actually small it will be undistributed below normal it means migration it means the school dropout it means poor conflict i leave town hoping against hope that by the time that i come back somehow the reigns will have washed away any prospect of violence we come back on the 18th of december 2016 almost a month later from his yolo town to the countryside i am greeted by a beautiful lush green green shoots of grass have replaced the dust coat that the county was under less than 30 days before everything seems to be right again but with forecasts being what they were before the rain fell i go back to the drought management office to check with lord man what our worry is that even normally the long range that is the march april may are not very good rains normally we don't expect a lot in this region what we normally expect a lot and people rely on it is the october november race but definitely it means that the march april may rains will be even below normal the levels of fossil nero currently is very low compared to the what you could say the normal how many kilometers from where it's supposed to drain is it draining currently it's actually draining even over 80 kilometers before where it's supposed to actually delorean swamps it's not good news the rains were so badly needed here the last time we saw the station like this was in 2009 and 2010 when we had the last worst drought because at this particular time that time the short rings failed and then the long range failed so we had a very bad situation and it was also accelerated by conflicts going back into the field i have to remind myself that the lush colors i'm seeing could be gone very quickly and everyone needs every drop of water they can get my first stop is at the greesa water pan when i was here last it was dry as a bone when we last came here at the height of the dry season it would be hard to imagine that this greaser dam would ever fill up with water in fact i was standing somewhere around over there where that stone has just splashed into the water and now life is returning to this dam there's donkeys coming to drink water here and people bringing their tanks to be able to fill them up and survive another day in this harsh climate but one way has to wonder whether indeed this really is the level that should be represented here at the dam what i'm told by residents is that it should be somewhere around here after a rainy season but a shorter rain season and longer drought spells have ensured that things aren't quite the same as they used to be 10 years ago again the further we move into borana territory the more the truth about the rains reveals itself these herders have been walking for 50 kilometers it's absolutely sweltering the goats can smell the water we are carrying in our car and soon we're surrounded [Applause] we move further this time it's a family that we meet they're also searching for pasture it's getting desperate the national drought management agency says that this drought has put at least sixty thousand people at risk of starvation just here in east yolo and aid agencies are trying to fill the gap here at balambata are getting one additional ration of food in preparation for the drought to come on my mind though is the conflicts that this pressure causes [Music] i make it back to gafasa where i met celesta and rashid rashid's mother and his 11 year old son were murdered by pastoralists from another community he's still bitter but there is cause to worry since we last met another village and a school here were attacked again everyone here is sure that they are being targeted for the land that they're on and from what i've seen the violence seems to be working when you think of the words climate change you often think about a rise in the temperatures and if you are standing where i'm standing right now you'd be right in assuming that that's the exact answer that encapsulates everything to do with the changing weather patterns that we are living through right now what people often don't think about are emptied out villages such as this one in belgesh here in this yolo county people lived here once these are where families cooked for one another this is where neighbors borrowed salt from one another and now nobody lives here because of conflict between communities people often don't make the distinction between the conflicts on the ground and the changing weather patterns in which they live in and the environment in which they live one would have to ask oneself if this was caused by climate change where are they now in samburu county shallow wells on the bed of the oasomiro river are the only way that herders can get to water for their cattle and guns are a lot more present here the herders shyness about their guns has melted away now i get the sense that they feel vulnerable at this shallow well they say that they need to be ready in case herders from other communities show up here as well i meet up with the morans who i had spent time with in late september 2016 they're headed for com at the border between samburu county and isilo county a dangerous place to be sure they're set up like a military unit but the need for grass drives them now more than anything else jhumala chaquette the head of these morans is a way checking on his family and has left his younger brother leharto in charge apa [Music] [Music] [Music] so they take our visit as a welcome break and let that guard down a little [Music] we take one last photo together capturing that moment in time before a very uncertain period in their lives [Music] we have the wet season grazing reserve we have the dry season and we have the drought grazing reserves and you see now currently they are supposed to be in the wet grazing reserves and people are now concentrating on along the narrow river and this is means that they are going into reserves areas much more earlier than the normal times therefore it means that a concentration of people will be moving towards calm calm area and we went to the drought-grazing reserves of yamicha tuma and even areas like boron and this is now an area where we also our neighboring counties the pastoral is also moving towards the area those are for example in comb they must have beat pastoralist people from marsha beat will be moving towards com sambar will be moving towards ko and then definitely we are seeing that there will be a likelihood of resource-based conflict the la chacoits are headed north to come a town at the border between isiolo and zamburu county but some of their tribesmen are heading towards the aberdare ranges where i started this story and to the lyquipia plains i catch up with one group of men and boys driving their cows through rumoruti into the abadares in the dead of the night these tens and hundreds of cattle being driven across the plains have been on a very long and desperate journey looking for grass looking for pasture and they're being driven up towards the aberdare ranges and mount kenya now the fear is that if they get there while there might be grass up in those ranges the temperatures will be so low too low for them to be able to survive and they could die in their hundreds pasture for their animals is their primary concern now and they search day and night for it the river that once quenched the thirst of animals in this region and the rains that renew the landscape may be back but for these communities those rains and that river may as well have come to an end [Music] [Music] [Music] in the next part of my journey i go to the plains of lycapia i see the cost of conflict firsthand one driven by drought a fight for land set up since the colonial days and bitter politics of a coming election this government is suggesting he wants to finish us we're headed down to maggianoka and we're the first ones who outside of the staff of the nicaea nature conservancy have been allowed to go anywhere close to the place that was burnt just a few days ago and to be honest i'm a little nervous because we don't know given there's a lot of security here but we don't know how close or how far the raiders are and it's dusk right now [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary - Nature

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Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full documentary, HD documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), nature documentary, Free Documentary Nature, Wildlife, Wildlife Documentary, Nature, Kenya, Draught, Climate Change, Global Warming, Environment, Water, Lack of Water, East Africa, Fridays For Future, The Fight For Water, East Africa Draught, Pastoralism, John-Allan Namu, john allan namu, North Kenya, Giving Nature A Voice

Id: iNT9zNM3WJo

Length: 44min 21sec (2661 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021