Nakuru County Peace Accord

The Nakuru County Peace Accord (or “Rift Valley Peace Accord”) refers to the peace agreement signed on 19 August 2012 between elders of the Agikuyu (see also Kikuyu) and Kalenjin communities as well as other ethnic groups of Kenya.

The agreement was signed following a 16-month-long peace process led by the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) to address sources of ethnic conflict and a history of violence in the rift valley region of Kenya.Nakuru County was seen as the epicenter of violence in the aftermath of the disputed 2007 Presidential Elections which left over 1,100 people dead and over 350,000 displaced nationwide.

Under the accord, the Agikuyu and Kalenjin elders signed a formal acknowledgment of past violence and antipathy between the communities, a code of conduct for communities in Nakuru County, a set of follow-up actions to be undertaken, and a commitment to dispute resolution. The accord was signed by the communities as an agreement to prevent future violence.

Kenya is populated by an estimated 42 ethnic communities primarily from the Bantu, Nilotic and Cushotic language families. Ethnic consciousness materialized and hardened under British colonial rule (c. 1895 - 1963) which endowed ethnicity as a social phenomenon with importance in the societal hierarchy. The British colonial influence left two legacies linked to ethnicity: land grievances and patronage politics.

Under British colonial policies, “white settler” populations confiscated close to 20% of Kenya’s most productive farming land from local communities. This policy displaced a large number of Kenyan natives, caused an influx of immigrant laborers not previously from the highlands and led to the creation of squatter settlements.

In the first part of the 20th century, calls for freedom and land redistribution gathered momentum leading in part to the Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1960), and eventually to various land redistribution schemes by the colonial administration ahead of independence in 1963. One of these schemes, known as the million acre scheme, sought to buy large swathes of land from settlers for the purposes of settling the squatters in the region. The scheme took on an ethnic character as it reflected the makeup of Kenya’s ethnic communities and especially the composition of the squatters, leading a large number of Kikuyu squatters to be settled in areas of the Rift Valley.

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