Turkana residents have a dispute worth our attention

Kenya: Ever since residents of Turkana
County held demonstrations over alleged
discrimination in hiring of workers at the
Tullow Oil wells, many Kenyans have
come out to criticise them and give them
all sorts of bad names.
However, before we throw stones at
them for being ‘uncivilised’, we need to
put ourselves in their shoes for a
moment. Here, we are talking of a
community that has been marginalised
since independence and when they
thought, at last, God has remembered
them, the ugly head of ‘bad leadership’
creeps in to spoil their party. These
residents are genuinely bitter.
We must agree oil discovery in Turkana
came as a good surprise. However, going
by the complaints raised, Tullow Oil
Company, an investor drilling the
Turkana’s ‘black gold’, started on a rather
wrong footing when it took community
engagement as a box-ticking exercise. A
rather loud arrogance and a don’t care
attitude became morepronounced every
time Tullow officials met with the
community representatives for round
tables. It is also claimed, at some point,
they indicated they were receiving orders
from ‘above’!
If the claims are true, Tullow’s approach is
an indicator the community interests
could not be accommodated.
No one should think I am advocating for
violence, but there are deep-seated
problems in this engagement that the
government and state security agencies
as well as Tullow cannot afford ignore.
{Lore Ambrose Ekunoit, Lokitaung}
We watched on TV as residents of
Turkana, armed with crude weapons,
demonstrated and threaten people’s lives
over alleged discrimination in hiring at the
Tullow oil wells in their backyard.
What interested me most was a question
by one of the protesters who wondered
why “even cleaning jobs were being given
to foreigners”. I was hard pressed to
imagine there were Ghanaians or
Norwegians coming to Kenya to do
cleaning or tea-girl jobs in Turkana. I later
realised it was not foreigners as I
thought, but ‘foreigners from within.
However, the ‘hard working and highly-
educated’ Turkana youth holding bows
and arrows should not have been allowed
to scare Tullow staff to a point that the
drilling had to be temporarily halted and
expatriates evacuated for lack of security.
This puts the youth and other gangs like
the Mombasa Republican Council on the
same level as agents of insecurity.
Our security agencies should not allow
this group to be our equivalent of Boko
Haram in Nigeria.
{Emmanuel Bahati Ngala, Malindi}
It is easy to dismiss residents of Turkana
for paralysing the activities of Tullow Oil
Company, but they deserve a hearing. We
may question their mode of airing
grievances but their concerns are logical.
These area residents should be the
immediate beneficiaries and should never
be ignored.
Standard news

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