In September 2025, Greenpeace Africa sounded the alarm. Reports had emerged that 50 acres of Imenti Forest in Meru County were being considered for a State Lodge, a golf course and an airstrip – a directive said to have come from the President himself during a meeting with Meru leaders. We called for an immediate halt. We demanded transparency. We said forests are not bargaining chips.
The government heard us. It chose to proceed anyway.
Nine months later, the threat has not just persisted – it has advanced through official channels. On 6th May 2026, the Principal Secretary for Forestry issued formal concurrence to the Chief Conservator of Forests for the excision of 2.75 hectares of Imenti Forest. The stated justification was road infrastructure under the Horn of Africa Gateway Development Project, financed by the World Bank’s International Development Association. But what has since emerged strips away any pretense of public interest: senior government officials and the Governor of Meru County have been reported touring Kambakia Forest, a section of Imenti, to identify sites for an airstrip, a golf course and a State Lodge.
This is how it always happens. A project enters through a side door, framed as infrastructure, framed as development, and by the time the full picture becomes clear, the administrative machinery is already in motion. Kenyans have seen this in Karura. In Ngong Road Forest. In the Mau Complex. Each time, the same promises of investment and economic growth are made. Each time, it is the forest that pays the price. And each time, it is communities – not the officials who signed the papers – who bear the consequences for decades.
According to Sherie Gakii, Communications and Storytelling Manager at Greenpeace Africa:
“Imenti Forest is not a new crisis. It is the same crisis, in a new location, with the same officials and the same tired excuses. Every time development needs land, it always finds a forest. Never a quarry. Never a degraded plot. Never the vast tracts held by the politically connected. Always a gazetted forest. Always a water tower. Always someone else’s inheritance to lose. That pattern needs to end.”
The pattern is now being institutionally embedded. The recent amendment to Section 56(2) of the Forest Conservation and Management Act expanded the Kenya Forest Service’s authority to issue easements and wayleaves in public forests under the guise of public utilities. Environmental defenders warned this would become a backdoor for commercial and political interests. The government was aware of those concerns. What is now unfolding in Imenti is a direct consequence of choosing to ignore them.
Article 62 of the Constitution is unambiguous: public forests are public land. Their protection and oversight belong to the National Land Commission, not to individual Principal Secretaries issuing concurrences in response to politically motivated requests. Any excision or conversion of gazetted forest land without full public participation, a credible environmental impact assessment, and constitutional compliance is unlawful. The government knows this. It is proceeding regardless.
Greenpeace Africa demands an immediate halt to all processes aimed at allocating, licensing or converting any part of Imenti Forest for commercial development. We call on the National Land Commission to assert its constitutional mandate and investigate how this concurrence was issued. We call on Parliament to scrutinise what is being done to Kenya’s gazetted forests in the name of infrastructure and prestige.
We further call on the World Bank and the International Development Association to urgently review their due diligence obligations. The Horn of Africa Gateway Development Project cannot be a vehicle, however indirect, for opening a protected forest to commercial development. That would be a direct contradiction of the environmental and social safeguards the Bank is bound to uphold.
We said it in September 2025 and we say it again today: Imenti Forest is not empty land. It is a water catchment, a biodiversity reserve, and a source of livelihood for communities who have no equivalent to replace it. Planting 15 billion trees means nothing if existing forests are quietly surrendered to serve powerful interests.
The government had every opportunity to act on the warnings raised last year. It made a different choice. The question now is whether Parliament, the National Land Commission, and Kenya’s courts will uphold what the Constitution demands, or whether Imenti will become the latest entry in a long record of forests lost to political convenience.
Imenti must be defended. Not in words. In action.
