Every dry season, the elephants of Mt. Kenya come home to Imenti. It is where they return when water grows scarce elsewhere. The Upper Imenti Forest holds the highest concentration of elephants in the entire Mt. Kenya ecosystem during the dry months. Mothers bring their calves here. It is, in the language of conservation, a maternity area. In the language of anyone paying attention, it is a nursery.
Someone has decided to build an airstrip right next to it.
What is happening right now
Construction of an airstrip inside the Upper Imenti Forest Reserve is already underway. Not planned. Not proposed. Underway. This is not a new threat. Greenpeace Africa raised the alarm in September 2025 when plans for a State Lodge, golf course and airstrip in Imenti first emerged. We called for an immediate halt. We said forests are not bargaining chips. The government heard us and chose to proceed anyway.
By June 2026, bulldozers were clearing ground in the Kithoka section of this gazetted protected forest. The Meru Environment and Land Court issued conservatory orders barring construction. The government moved in anyway, and mature trees were felled under heavy security as work continued. The Forestry PS then announced the airstrip would be ready for its first aircraft by June 18.
No public participation, as the Constitution requires. No Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, as the law demands. No NEMA licence. A court order. And still the bulldozers kept moving.
The Mt. Kenya ecosystem hosts more than 880 plant species, 81 of them found nowhere else on earth. It supports leopard, bongo, and more than 50 species of African highland birds. It sits on the hydrological divide between the Tana and Ewaso Nyiro river systems, meaning what happens here doesn’t stay here. It travels downstream, into farmlands, into homes, into the water that millions of Kenyans drink.
This is not an empty plot. It never was.
What it means for the elephants
Between 1,900 and 2,600 elephants live on Mt. Kenya. They are not evenly spread. During the dry season, they concentrate in Upper Imenti. The place being cleared for a runway is precisely where elephants need to be most when conditions elsewhere are hardest.
Putting construction noise, human activity and permanent infrastructure next to a maternity area means placing it in the one spot these animals are most vulnerable. Calves being born. Mothers at their most protective. A community of animals that has survived in this ecosystem for centuries, in the precise spot they have always chosen to bring new life into.
And then there is the corridor. Upper and Lower Imenti form the central section of the wildlife route connecting Mt. Kenya to conservation landscapes in northern Kenya. That corridor is how elephants move, how they find food, mates and water across a landscape that has sustained them for centuries. Fragment it with infrastructure and you do not just block a path. You break a system that cannot be reassembled once it is gone.
You cannot move a maternity area. You cannot compensate a calf for the bulldozer that arrived before it did.
The PS said Meru has no airstrip. That is not true.
The Forestry PS defended the project with this: “It is only Meru County where you cannot land. We have no landings.”
Gaitu Airstrip is 14 kilometres from Meru Town, on a paved road. Meru National Park has its own airstrips at Kinna, Mulika and Mughwongo. Isiolo International Airport, a full international facility whose runway extends into Meru County, sits 35 kilometres away. It was built specifically to open up this region’s tourism circuit.
Upgrading Gaitu would cost less, break no laws, and harm no elephants. And so it was not chosen.
It is also worth noting that separately, the Kenya Wildlife Service has licensed three hotels inside Meru National Park and allocated Approximately 2 million USD to renovate the Mulika Airstrip inside the park. Two different protected areas. Two separate projects. The same logic: protected land is available land.
A court order is not optional
A government that moves machinery into a gazetted forest under heavy security to outrun a court order is not building infrastructure. It is telling its own institutions, and the law, that they do not matter when they get in the way.
NEMA must halt these works. The National Land Commission must assert its mandate over public forest land. And Parliament must ask hard questions about what is being done to Kenya’s protected forests in the name of state lodges and political pledges.
Choose the other field
The elephants of Mt. Kenya have returned to Imenti every dry season for centuries. They chose this forest because it holds what they need. A state lodge and a runway are not reasons to take that from them.
Gaitu is 14 kilometres away. The international airport is 35. The access exists. The only thing missing is the willingness to use it instead of the forest.
Stop the bulldozers. Respect the court order. Let the elephants keep their dry season home. And prove, for once, that development in Kenya does not have to cost us the things we cannot get back.
Iconic Kenyan forests making up almost 10 times the size of Nairobi are under threat.
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