Transport was disrupted for over three hours along the Nairobi-Nakuru Highway on Saturday after hundreds of protesters took came out in their numbers to protest.
The hundreds of protestors comprising elderly demonstrators laying claim to the 8,000 acre Lari Nyakinyua Land in Gilgil, Nakuru County blocked the Highway demanding that their grievances be heard.
At the top of their grievance is that they want to be able to access the expansive piece of land in Gilgil. The residents urged the national government to assign security officers to enable them access the contested piece of land.
Carrying protesting placards, and chanting " haki, yetu", the residents expressed their discontentment claiming that another group of squatters are currently occupying the land, denying them access to the land which they claim was acquired 49 years ago.
The piece of land in was reportedly bought by the Lari Nyakinyua Group, the protesting party in 1975.
According to the Lari-Nyakinyua Group, the squatters occupied the land and refused to move. This caused friction and is at the heart of the dispute pitting the two parties against each other.
The protesting group claims it has previously won nine cases in the courts with regards to the land but smell a sinister move to push them out of the land.
"We are here because we want our land, we contributed money 49 years ago, in 1975, but our land has been taken by influential persons. We want the ones occupying our land to vacate", one of the residents complained.
The residents are now calling upon Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki to intervene and have the matter settled once and for all.
"We are here to say that we have rejected oppression, come what may, we have refused to let our land be grabbed", a protester said.
"Return our land, we want our land. There is an attempt to grab land we have owned for over 40 years", another old man in the protest decried.
In 2019, the Lari Nyakinyua Group members won a court case regarding ownership of the land. However, since then, they have not been issued with title deeds.
