In July President William Ruto lifted a logging ban imposed by President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2018.
The public was made to believe that the ban, on all forms of logging, would save our forests and put an end to criminal loggers bribing forest service mandarins to destroy the environment and water catchment areas, endangering the ecosystem in the process.
Sadly, as we have come to expect in a country in which just about every public system leaks and reeks of corruption, Auditor General Nancy Gathungu reports that her team has established massive and illegal cutting of trees, especially in water catchment areas, whose net effect is to endanger the flow of rivers and the human and animal life the rivers support.
Our strident civil society groups, appropriately, made a point of opposing the decision to lift the ban, preferring that the ban remain in place.
The audit evidence clearly demonstrates that the timber cartels are so entrenched and so powerful a ban or no ban means nothing. Their mercenary desires seem to override national environmental interests.
The Kenya Forest Service has one of the most delicate and onerous responsibilities of making sure our trees are not cut without justification.
The greedy bureaucrats who made personal financial gain trump national interest must be weeded out. That’s not an option at a time the same KFS continues to set even more lofty targets of planting 15 billion trees by 2032.
Quote of the Day: “Man has gone to the moon but he does not yet know how to make a flame tree or a bird song. Let us keep our dear countries free from irreversible mistakes which would lead us in the future to long for those same birds and trees.”
Félix Houphouët-Boigny
The first President of Ivory Coast, known as the ‘Sage of Africa’, was born on October 18, 1905
