Nobel Prize winner rocks the boat

July 22 2007 at 11:34AM

By Maina Waruru

The growing international popularity of Kenyan Nobel laureate Professor Wangari Maathai is not echoed at home.

This week the renowned environmentalist shared the prestigious Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights with South Africa's former chief justice and Constitutional Court president, Arthur Chaskalson.

The award carries a prize of R70 000 and a sponsored trip to the United States. This will mean yet another absence for Maathai, an MP, from her constituency in the Nyeri district of central Kenya, with elections only four months away.

Her constituents are not complaining that she is neglecting large matters of state. They are mainly concerned that she does not distribute the largesse they have come to expect from politicians. Rural politicians are supposed to spend their weekends providing feasts for leading figures in their constituencies and handing out favours. Maathai has refused to play this game and so has been dubbed "mean and miserly".

Her constituents especially resent her spending most of her substantial award and appearance money on planting trees rather than on their pleasures.

They are also unhappy that Maathai has continued to campaign to have squatters and loggers removed from the sensitive ecosystem of the Abedare forest, source of the rivers that supply the capital with water. Many of her constituents are squatters or loggers.

It was her international acclaim that helped propel her into parliament four years ago.

She is also lucky to hail from the same region as President Mwai Kibaki who remains, despite various controversies, a favoured son of most people of the region. But Maathai is now expected to support Kibaki. Choosing instead to tread her own path and to be forthright in opinions seen as hostile to the president, has triggered a rebellion in her Tetu constituency.

Opposition there has been growing since 2005, when she refused Kibaki's request that she continue serving as deputy environment minister. Her constituents regarded that as an insult to Kibaki.

Impotent

But as Maathai pointed out this week, she found herself impotent in the post: "Deforestation continued for the two years I served there as corrupt forestry officials looked on, and I could do nothing."

But her timing was unlucky. She turned Kibaki down after he had suffered an embarrassing defeat in a referendum that nearly brought down his government. Several members of Kibaki's political alliance and the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM-K) were seen to "gang up" on the president and several refused posts in government. And she compounded this supposed offence by not siding with either of the two main political factions.

And when Kibaki and his allies formed the National Rainbow Coalition-Kenya (Narc-K) party, she again stood aside, forming her own unaligned Mazingira (Environment) Party (MPK) of Kenya.

As a result of her declining political stakes, 10 potential challengers for Maathai's seat have already emerged, all of whom have been distributing gifts - in cash and kind - and making promises of rapid development in Tetu. Maathai seems unperturbed.

Her Green Belt Movement continues to thrive and the MPK is growing. - africanewsfeatures.com-IFS