Kwale Governor Fatuma Achani has visited 25 displaced families at Mwembeni in Samburu electoral ward in Kinango Sub County and distributed assorted food and non-food items.
The families were displaced after gangs armed with crude weapons attacked them and torched their houses in the dead of the night on Monday.
The donated assorted food items included maize flour, beans, rice, cooking oil, and non-food items such as utensils and beddings.
Governor Achani who directly supervised the distribution of the items was visibly dismayed over the manner in which the families were brutally evicted.
The county boss said the visit was to sympathize with the victims over the incident and urged the national government to improve security.
The Governor blamed the attack on a private developer who is seeking to displace the residents from their settlement along the Mombasa-Nairobi highway.
She termed the eviction move by an influential private developer as unacceptable because the residents were not served any eviction notice.
“No one has the right to sell a piece of land in a group ranch. It is against the law to evict these residents from their land,” she said.
Achani, who was accompanied by senior county government officials, urged the local police to beef up security in the area.
She called on the locals to cooperate with the security agencies by providing crucial information on suspicious movements and activities in their localities.
Achani pledged to work with the national government and the National Land Commission (NLC) to ensure that justice is served to the displaced residents.
She said about 90 school children have lost their learning materials in the attack and torching of their homesteads.
According to one of the residents Mwanaidi Mwajirani, they will now be forced to begin afresh as their property has been destroyed in the raid.
“I have lost everything in my house and all my crops on the farm have been destroyed by the goons and now we have no place to go,” she lamented.
Mwajirani said the gangs destroyed their livelihoods by burning food stores and looting foodstuffs and maiming several people during the raid.
By Hussein Abdullahi
