So LET'S FACE IT!
There is a quiet unease that has been spreading across Kenya’s farms and community lands, and it has everything to do with a piece of legislation that most people have not yet read but are already learning to fear. The Forest Conservation and Management (Amendment) Bill 2025, sponsored by Hon. Kimani Ichung’wah, arrives with a noble mission: to strengthen forest governance, promote commercial forestry, and align Kenya with global carbon markets. On paper, these are worthy goals. But on the ground, where farmers wake up before dawn to tend shambas they may or may not legally own, and where communities have watched well-intentioned policies curdle into bureaucratic nightmares, this Bill raises a very simple question: why must something as common-sense as growing a tree become so complicated?
Tree growing is not a technical mystery. It is not a privilege reserved for those who can afford lawyers or navigate government portals. It is one of the most universally understood acts of stewardship on this planet. A farmer knows that trees hold soil, provide shade, bear fruit, and eventually become timber or firewood. A community knows that a standing forest is a water tower and a windbreak. None of this requires a director of forest regulation or a uniformed officer to explain. What farmers and communities need is not instruction or permission but encouragement – policy that removes obstacles, clarifies rights, and gets out of the way. Unfortunately, this Bill leans in the opposite direction. By creating new regulatory positions, empowering the Kenya Forest Service as a disciplined force, and positioning the state as the primary manager of carbon projects even on public forests, the Bill signals a deepening of control rather than a broadening of participation. That is a dangerous signal.
Overregulation has a long and unhappy history in Kenya. Whenever the state has reached too far into the everyday lives of its citizens – whether in agriculture, trade, or land use – the response has rarely been cheerful compliance. More often, it breeds resentment, then resistance, and eventually open rebellion or a quiet withdrawal into informal economies. People do not like being told they need permission to plant a tree on land their family has farmed for generations. That is not an anti-government stance; it is a deeply human reaction to unnecessary control. A smart government, one that actually wants more trees in the ground, would build a synergetic environment where private enterprise and community initiative feed into public policy, not one where every sapling comes with a form to fill.
To be fair, strengthening the Kenya Forest Service is not the problem. KFS officers work in difficult conditions, often underfunded and underappreciated, and professionalising the service through proposals like the Kenya Forest Academy is a step forward. But there is a lingering discomfort that Kenyans have learned to carry about any disciplined force. Questions about unfair recruitment, ethnic balancing, political patronage, and the heavy-handedness that sometimes accompanies uniformed authority are not paranoid fantasies. They are lived realities. Unlike security forces – where discipline and hierarchy are necessary for protection – public, private, and community forests require a different philosophy. They thrive under collective ownership, shared responsibility, and local accountability. The belief that someone at the top, sitting in a Nairobi office, knows how to manage every tree in every corner of the country is not just arrogant; it is ecologically foolish. Local farmers know their rainfall patterns, their soil types, and their pest cycles. A uniformed officer who transfers in from another county every two years does not.
Then there is the matter of carbon credits, which is where this Bill moves from mildly troubling to morally slippery. The proposal to empower KFS to implement carbon projects in public forests sounds progressive until you look at the track record of such schemes globally and locally. Carbon markets are notoriously prone to greenwashing – companies paying for offsets while continuing to pollute, consultants inflating carbon sequestration data, and governments using questionable accounting to claim climate progress. In Kenya, there are already allegations of irregularly negotiated carbon deals, signed without meaningful community consent, with benefits flowing to a few well-connected intermediaries while the actual custodians of the trees see little more than a handshake. This Bill, as currently drafted, does not adequately protect against that. Worse, it risks normalising a system where the moral imperative to care for our environment is replaced by a transactional logic: plant a tree not because it is right, but because someone will pay for its carbon. And when the payment stops, what happens to the tree?
This brings us to the deeper question, the one no Bill can legislate into existence: how do we motivate people to do the right thing regardless of the available reward? A farmer who plants a tree because she understands its value to her children’s future will protect that tree with or without a carbon credit. A community that guards its water tower because it knows the springs will dry without the forest does not need a compliance officer to remind them. The law’s role should be to remove barriers, not to micromanage virtue. But this Bill, in its current form, seems designed by people who trust neither farmers nor communities, who believe that only state oversight can prevent destruction, and who have forgotten that the most successful conservation stories in Kenya – from the green hills of Murang’a to the managed woodlands of the Maasai – have been local ones, driven by people who simply decided to act.
The Forest Bill 2025 is not malicious. It is, like many well-intentioned laws, a little too in love with control and a little too distant from the ground. If the government truly wants more trees, it should make it easy, profitable, and dignified to grow them. It should strengthen KFS as a service, not a force. It should devolve not just offices but authority. It should treat carbon credits with scepticism, demand transparency, and never allow false data or budget-driven greenwashing to undermine real sequestration. Most of all, it should remember that a tree is not a resource to be regulated. It is a gift to be nurtured. And the people who nurture it best are the ones who wake up beside it every morning.
SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE!
About Author: Kevin Makova is the CEO & Founder at Forezava, he works to build a community that opens up opportunities.
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