Adrian met up with Mohammed Elmi, to talk about the challenges that need to be met if pastoralism can support people into the future
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It seems to me the response to the humanitarian crisis is very good, is very efficient. It works very well, but it lays you open to the next question which is 'how can we stop this happening?' because it just seems that’s all we do. It’s just a perpetuating cycle of drought and crisis and feeding. The first time I thought 'well, how can these people be pastoralists ever?' because it just doesn’t seem a sustainable lifestyle.

Now that I’ve been back and seen when it’s green and there’s plenty of water, you can see why it works and that it’s the only kind of useful use of that land. But it seems there’s far too many of them and the droughts are going to increase aren’t they, because of global warming, and they’re never going to get restored to the levels they were twenty years ago, so what are they going to do?

In my view, I mean maybe the same question was asked in ‘84. I happened to be in Wajir during the ‘84 drought and some people were saying will pastoralism be there twenty years on, and now that it’s already past twenty years on we’re having still the same questions. I think while pastoralism is probably one of the most, should I say, adaptable, pastoralists are the most adaptable people in a very, should I say, harsh environment.

And you talked about climate change, I would actually say as climate change comes people should look to pastoralists, how they’ve adapted, and thinking that oh, probably it’s what is going to end pastoralism. Probably it will increase the number of people who are trying to make a life in inhospitable areas.

I think for a long time since nation states took place in these areas, pastoralism was sort of left to its devices, yet a lot of adaptations have come along. A very simple one is borders. You know, borders were created, not only international borders, actually district borders now is hampering of one of the key pastoralist coping strategies.

Yet no planning or mechanism has been put in place in order for pastoralists to find other mechanisms to adapt, for example. So while the land remains the same, and they have been closed before they would move wherever it took them, and there was no nation state to control them and … [Talking together]

So they would have gone into Somalia and Ethiopia?

They would probably come closer to the Kenya highlands if they were not stopped by the British. Oh yeah, that was one of the policy, the rain policy, that pastoralists are not allowed to come down, and that’s why Ellis will tell you all this belongs to this clan because it was a way of actually stopping pastoralists from moving quite a lot.

But, the other side, if there was a plan, a plan with pastoralists, I could still see how pastoralists could still make a fairly, should I say, a happy life within pastoralism in those areas. While of course people like me would leave and be able to join other forms of life. Because I think although pastoralism has been turned into a way of life, pastoralists quite easily, if they find themselves in towns, adapt to other forms of making lives.

My good example is one of my brothers in the ‘92 drought lost almost everything, came to town, had small money, gave him his tyre shop. Within five years he restored; he had camels, goats and cattle.

And he moved back to pastoralism?

And then he moved back to pastoralism. Now he’s lost most of the cattle but he’s got camels because this time he decided to diversify and to have camels. So, but also there are people who are in this town whom I know are millionaires who dropped out during droughts, and there are people who are very senior in government who were brought into town because of drought and were actually helped by that relief in town.

So sometimes people say oh, does this relief actually help, but actually the people who get saved and they contribute to the world in different ways. I mean I know education is, I know also of different parts people have come to town.

But what can be done in my view is government’s beginning to view those people as part of the population, and rather than seeing pastoralists as separate and things you don’t understand, actually saying they just need different type of attention, just the way coffee farmers are different from tea farmers.

And people talk of oh, how much subsidy we do, but Kenya tea farmers got five billion credit for giving when the government came in. Banks collapsed so they get four billion just like that, and yet these are not considered as that. They only get twenty - it has to be a relief. Why not set up a fund in which pastoralists can contribute to and when they lose their livestock they can actually be restocked if they have to. Or serious efforts, let’s say, on education, for example.

So one of the major things that could actually make pastoralists come out of that, one of the easiest routes is education, but it has to be quality education. It can be, you know, bring them to some classroom with some teacher then they fail, and they then lose out on both.

I remember in ‘96 an old man telling me some villages were doing participatory prioritisation and an old man look, look stop, he told those people don’t prioritise education, and he just pulled a young strong man, had just finished his O-level, and he said look he’s here, he can go back, help me, look at the younger one than him, he’s herding the animals, he can’t herd and he can’t get the job, he can’t fit into the other system.

So, again, if education is not of quality you actually do more damage, and then you have more and more destitutes in the urban centres. Again, it’s possible to, if there’s a big plan to make pastoralism the economy to act, for example. The whole of let’s say, should I say, one full region which is Northern Kenya and the upper part of Eastern have only six kilometres of tarmac, and therefore how do they bring.

So, ultimately, it’s basically the pastoralisms and their leadership, and the government saying okay, this is a population, let’s plan and let’s plan long term. But what is the problem in my view is even when Kenya now has opened more, even when the rhetoric of the government is saying let’s develop the asset, pastoralists have not organised themselves in a form that they can engage with, should I say, the system in which they can use their votes or their members of parliament.

Very few of them are registered to vote, aren’t they?

Yes. So pastoralists have our voted MPs in parliament, that’s a big block if they work in the interest of their population. So I think the whole concept of representation again is not that well understood, or at least not part of it. So it’s almost a vicious cycle. You have poor education, you have a population that can be manipulated for election into a long plan or monetary terms and, therefore, you don’t get good representation. So actually to interact, you have to get a government which thinks of all its populations, but you also have to get the population organise themselves and holding their representative to account. Probably MP was shocked that he actually brought people so they couldn’t see him, because I don’t think that happens at all.

If and when the next drought comes along, what do you think they should do?
First, in my view, I’ve seen people, as I say we restocked in ‘84. Oxfam did restock some victims in ’84. And up to 2000 I’ve still met them having. When I asked them why people lost subsequently and you have not lost, the bigger proportion of those who get restocked and who are willing to go back, they say we’ve learned more than before. They say okay, a few of us will still might lose, a lot of them first quite quickly tried to diversify, so usually their stock is more short. They try to buy other forms. Almost the majority of them leave some children and some part of the family in school and they know the importance of it, they know what it means to be hungry in a town. So they seem to work hard at it, but that’s not the overall solution. So they diversify more, they will try to put some children …

What are the possibilities for diversifying?

Most droughts, if you say there are some droughts, there are cattle and small stocks like shorts, and there are some droughts that are camel, and usually when it’s camel it’s when there’s conflict and people can move around so the camels can go very far, and then they’re caught with a disease, that’s the type of droughts they get.

So like the brother I told you about, he deliberately, before he used to say I don’t want to take camels but he decided to let me have some. He put it with my other brother who keeps camels and now he’s saving the whole of his family. So they would do those kind of things.

Do you think there’s anything other than pastoralism that they can do out of the bush?

Oh, in the bush?

Yeah.

Again, it’s undeveloped. There’s the whole things around gum, gum Arabic.

Gum, yeah?

It’s exported to China.

We noticed in our compound at the Catholic Mission that there’s lots of aloe vera growing, it seems a very good environment.

Yes. That’s one at the moment, there’s a whole group of people who again collect and sell that. But I think the quickest one is livestock, if the road infrastructure is done.

The road seems like a no-no. I mean we talked to the ... he said going to do 20 kilometres this year.

Yes, if the roads are done. They struck off opening the airport, for example, that big airport into just commercial and they’re business people who are interested, so I don’t think it will cost the government much to allow that, and maybe they just give tax holidays. I think it’s possible. So they don’t have to, in my view. I think it’s sit and just have a plan and which pastoralists are involved so that you don’t end up with things that actually would make it worse. Like at the moment, it’s development of water, for example, people just put in water. And every time I talk to pastoralists they say look, when they put them in places where we don’t want, like our grazing, they find it very difficult. But again, it’s not our dialogue. People think it’s a development. Most people, if you say it nationally, people are saying let’s put a bore hole, their problem is water, but actually it’s a balance of how you use water and how you use different types of vegetation in different seasons of the year.