The Kenyan government has been accused of playing down the crisis albeit the president imposed a curfew in the affected areas and deployed a two-thousand strong contingent of a special police unit.

The accusing finger is, as usual, trained upon political power-plays and strategic displacement of particular ethnic groups to ‘even out’ numbers before the next elections, to be held in six months. The political angle is being widely covered, scrutinized and served public discourse, but what exactly does the Tana hold that even brazen blood-letting cannot seem to pacify?

Although rarely highlighted in the local media, Tana River has for long now been an epicenter of a different kind of war: a fight to save the massive wetland from destruction through planned large-scale food and bio-fuel projects and the inevitable forced eviction of the locals.

There are presently close to fifty court cases by the locals, environmental groups, private citizens and NGOs against government entities and commercial multi-nationals already setting camp in the Delta in an obstinate scramble for its riches.

Tana River Delta is a 130,000 ha (320,000 acres) wetland that supports an intricate network of biodiversity in its rich ecosystem; home to over 350 bird species, 22 of them endangered, the Tana River red colobus and the crested mangabey primates also threatened with extinction and hundreds of other flora and fauna calling it their natural habitat.

It is also an essential resource shared between the local pastoral and farming communities, mainly the Orma and the Pokomo- the two communities recently reported to have visited death and devastation upon one another. The Tana Delta provides much needed pasture to the pastoralists, mainly the Orma during dry times and water from Tana River for the farmers, mainly Pokomos on the other hand.

“To understand the conflict one must consider the force or forces from outside the area, wanting in on the riches of the land. These are the people from the neighbouring counties, especially the pastoralists, commercial agriculture corporate and foreign governments seeking rich farmlands for growing food for their own people”, writes Sara Bakata on her Sunday Nation column in relation to the recent ethnic clashes that rocked the area.

The scramble for the riches of the Tana by outside forces with commercial interests started close to two decades ago when international commercial farming corporate showed interests of starting large-scale projects in the expansive area. Some of these entities include Mumias Sugar Company and Tana and Athi River Development Authority (TARDA), a Kenyan public company and public authority respectively, who have advanced plans to turn 70,000 ha of the Delta into sugarcane plantations, maize and rice (TARDA actually commenced its project in December 2010).

A Canadian firm Bedford Biofuels has been cleared by the government for its ‘pilot’ project of turning 10,000 ha into a Jatropha curcas (a biofuel crop) farm and the project commenced in May 2011. However, in July, two months after Bedford published their project commencement, two directors of National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) were suspended for irregularly granting the license to the firm despite damning scientific evidence of effects of Jatropha to the Delta ecosystem.

The Bedford project has not been halted and there are final plans to put 162,000 acres more under the Jatropha crop. A British company G4 Industries Limited, in a move hailed by environmentalists, withdrew plans for similar large-scale oil seed crops (caster, crambe and sunflower) projects in the area after the BBC highlighted the plight of the Tana.

Meanwhile, the TARDA maize and rice project has been nothing but an embarrassing fail, and the over 2,000 Wardei locals forcibly evicted from Gamba village in 2010 to pave way for the project are still without any tenure security or compensation, whereas the sugarcane project by Mumias Sugar Company is still underway.

The government has taken a silent stance in all these allegations and only in July last year did it convene an inter-ministerial meeting, facilitated by Nature Kenya in Naivasha to formulate a strategic framework for sustainable development of Kenyan Deltas, Tana included.

The fight for the Tana Delta is still on-going and it proves to be a long and relentless one given the stakes on the table for all sides. It is not known if the recent ethnic violence can be pegged mainly on political reasons or some of the environmental resource issues raised in this article, but what is certain is that the hardest and bitter war for the Delta is silently being waged between those who want to sustain and save the all-important wetland against the government and the avaricious commercial agricultural corporates who want the delta for themselves.