Part 1
HOSTILE TAKEOVER
Without warning, at noon on the 18th of March, 2016, a wrecking crew crashed through the gate and garden of House No. 53, 2nd Avenue Parklands, indiscriminately ripping up the grounds, and with it, a debated legacy of national historic significance.
“I woke up to bulldozers taking down our indigenous 100 year-old trees. Watching the trees indiscriminately being felled was like watching a human massacre,” says Sandeep Desai recounting the destruction of his family’s property. “When they first came in it was with 30-plus hooligans and they were pelting my dogs with stones and ransacking my mother’s apartment. I went to the police and they tried to negotiate an agreement, despite the fact that it is not their place; it is their remit to protect. Yet here I am, with a wall built around my house and my front door blockaded. I fear for my life.”
Tactics of harassment and physiological intimidation have been used to try and oust Sandeep and his mother, Nila R. Desai, from the compound, but Sandeep refuses to budge in an ultimate act of self-imposed house arrest and against much of the advice that surrounds him. He is defending with tooth and nail, hanging on to two injunctions most likely slipping from his fingers to what looks like a teary and devastating end.
Despite court ordered injunctions and perhaps because of a visible absence of police enforcement and protection, Suchan Investment, Ltd, a contested 50 percent shareholder of the land, entered the property and waylaid the grounds of the celebrated Jashbhai M. Desai home.
Suchan Investments, for its part, maintains it is in legal ownership of at least half of the Desai 1.7 acre plot and have, for the moment, a recent ruling from the Appeals Court on their side.
This would otherwise read as a typical land grab story, if it weren’t for the narrative’s compounding complications and contradictions from all sides. Surrounding the drama are incompetency, lethargy, corruption or apathy on the part of all other parties, be it the police, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage or the Justice System itself. In all likelihood both aggrieved parties share some blame, and nothing is as it appears on the surface: internal Desai family infighting on the one hand, and the rungu of the brutal industrial machine in the other.
As observers we are asked to try and make a distinction between the romantic and the real: can we truly believe justice can prevail and our institutions will protect us and that politicians are not corrupt, or is it that we are forever quelled into a cynical prison of fear?
Is there truly justice in a narrative where the victim is an inanimate object? A piece of hotly debated, historic property at the center of a morality play, with a cast of characters (the Desai Family, Suchan Investments, Nairobi City County, High Court of Kenya, the Police, The Ministry of Culture and Heritage) who are either too apathetic or negligent to make a difference, twisted by the tragic forces of corruption and impunity; a place where the romantic dream — the one where we care about our heritage and the hero stands up against destructive forces and wins — is killed by the real notion that everything is, actually, broken, and the real narrative is a sad commentary on the state of the truth—a truth that gets mired in the grey, byzantine corridors of the state’s inept bureaucratic machinery?
Do we really care about our past? And if not, what does that say about our future?
A PIECE OF (DEBATED) HISTORY
According to Desai records, the 2nd Parklands estate has been in the Desai family for over 77 years and seemingly commemorates the life of Jashbhai M. Desai, an ‘unsung hero’ in the struggle for Kenya’s Independence.
In a “Quest for Equality: Asian Politics in East Africa, 1900-1967” by Robert G. Gregor, the J.M. Desai residence is sited as serving as a base of nationalist politics during the same period, and there is at least some tangential evidence of a long-standing relationship between the founding president and J.M. Desai. During that historic era, the Desai home registry records hosting many of the great leaders of independence and the numerous Kenyan African Union foreign guests denied access to the then predominantly white-owned hotels…a place, where “Kenya’s freedom fighters spent most of their time working on political strategy.” They included Lord Fenner Brockway, Sir Dingle Foot and Pio Gama Pinto and very many others.
However, during Kenya’s “finest hours of freedom, Mr. Desai embraced the victory simply and retreated to the background and stayed there while never demanding any favours until his death in July 1991,” according to Desai source documents. “A visitors’ book includes the signatures of African Nationalists Kenneth Kaunda, Joshua Nkomo and other foreign dignitaries Indira, Rajiv and Sanjeev Gandhi notwithstanding,” says a visibly upset Sandeep expounding on his home’s historical impact. “This is a dire cultural scenario that reflects terribly to the rest of the world. The Ministry of Culture and Heritage, has the power to uphold its original designation and spot gazette this property immediately and stop all of this madness, but it is doing nothing.”
The National Museums of Kenya applied these historical references and the UNESCO guidelines as a basis to preserve and declare the Desai home a National Monument. It achieved this status by official Gazette notice in April 2008 as duly confirmed on October 9th, 2008, by way of Legal Notice 128.
An uncle, a cousin and Suchan Investments, Ltd. had other plans.
A DEAL GONE VERY WRONG
As part of his will, Sandeep’s grandfather passed his title deed onto two children (Sandeep’s Uncle, Niranjan Desai, and Aunt, Dipa Pulling ) and two grandchildren (Sandeep and Kevit Desai) “as tenants in common in equal shares’’ with a view, according to Sandeep, to preserving the home into the future and to foster unity between two grandsons (Kevit and Sandeep) whom he hoped would lead the family name and business interests into the future.
The family solidarity around the property lasted a little more than a decade until less noble rewards came calling. Unceremoniously, in a terse letter sent through their advocates in March, 2008, Niranjan and Kevit announced the sale of their shares in the land to a third party, Suchan Investments, Ltd., whose directors are listed as Kamal Chandulal and Smita Kamal Shah.
The scars of a protracted family battle are beginning to show.
“They sold shares and brought in outsider goon-style property developers to our bed without due permission, and therefore illegally,” say Sandeep. “They sold the shares, but did not even clarify which part of the property they sold, which has resulted in all this recent mayhem… Niranjan is my uncle and my father’s oldest and only surviving brother—an Oxford Brasenose half-blue legal boffin who should have known better!”
According to Sandeep’s Aunt, Mrs. Dipa Pulling, Niranjan, her eldest (and only remaining) brother of three, has been and remains intent of depriving Mrs. Pulling of her final remaining inheritance and property in Kenya, where she grew up. She adds that, “Kenya as a country must value its heritage as has historically been the case in the UK,” where she primarily resides, and that “Nairobi as a city must safeguard historical sites.”
(Multiple attempts to reach the legal representatives of Suchan Investments, Ltd and Nirajan and Kevit for comment have gone unanswered.)
Following the initial notifications of the sale, the first on site confrontation occurred when the resident Desais blocked Suchan Investments from coming onto the plot in April 2008; it was then that the National Monument designation thwarted the developer’s plans. And from that point forward, a near decade long family war and legal battle ensued.
It is at this point in the narrative at which the observer sees an emerging hero, a story we want to root for at all costs—Sandeep himself, who represents a sense of righteousness, the fight for a good cause. But for as much hope as one can garner proving right can master wrong, even if blindly, we are left, in this case, with a Don Quixote, his broken lancer against an insurmountable windmill.
But an odd bedfellow would come to his rescue.
SONKO THE SAVIOUR (SORT OF)
Though they had never met, the flamboyant and outspoken Nairobi Senator, Hon. Mike Sonko, came to the aid of the Desai family on March 24th as evidenced by a video he made and posted on his Facebook page, now viewed by over 33,000 people. In it, he is visibly fielding distraught complaints by Sandeep and his mother regarding the intruders, while making commitments to seek justice.
“My mother is elderly, and her apartment was ransacked and robbed by thugs when they arrived here, and that’s criminal. The police have done nothing about this to date, and no one has been brought to book,” says Sandeep.
“Sonko removed these imposters, personally, physically, and he was a tremendous support… in fact, he threw everyone off the property…and he knew they were here illegally…he delayed their operation to destroy this house, so he had a big impact…I found him to be very caring at that time.”
According to Sonko, he is performing the duties of his position by intervening in a case such as the Desai House, as he his done several times before in issues involving suspected land grabs and land rates abuses. He says he has been involved in several cases similar to Sandeep’s, including recent interventions on properties in Upperhill and Ngong Rd, where he saved an 80-plus year-old woman from being forcibly evicted from her family home.
“Land grabbing is systematic in Nairobi. The injustice of it is a plague on our city. You find that it’s the same people involved almost all the time—the same agents, the same lawyers, the same auctioneers. Rampant corruption at every level keeps it going,” says Senator Sonko, who points his implied statements towards the highest reaches of the Nairobi City County offices.
Sonko insists that there is no political motivation behind his involvement in protecting innocent people from the wheels of injustice; that according to him, “he is just doing his job.” Though it’s hard not to see a political angle when so much is going wrong with local institutions meant to serve and protect a constituent base being systematically trampled in Nairobi. Whether stated or not, a bid for the Governor spot seems to be gaining traction amongst his supporters online.
“Whether I become the next Nairobi City County Governor or not, I will handle some issues in the Nairobi way. There are people who brag and boast that they are above the law because they have pocketed everyone in the system. Justice must be served equally to all; the poor and the rich,” says Sonko.
In all likelihood Sonko is a sideshow distracting the observer from the real story and that, despite loud voices of protest the end of this road is likely ruin.
TO BE CONTINUED…
A March 4th ruling from the Appeals Court following a blockbuster eight-year land case did not go in Sandeep’s favour despite two pending injunctions to be heard on Sept. 13th of this year. Inside this highly complex and serpentine legal affair we see the very constitutionality of certain land rights in question, we see the Ministry of Culture and Heritage called to the floor of the Appeals Court and we see some real cases of grinding ineptitude on the part of key national institutions. (More to come on this subject as the story unfolds.)
If there were ever a truly Kafkaesque courtroom tale that shows the main character descending further and further into bureaucratic hell, this would be it.
As the Desai home hangs in the balance, the recent Appeals Court judgment crushes any notion that the Desai House has cultural or heritage significance, in a almost insulting manner, given that the Attorney General’s office did not present justification of the property status in its submissions on behalf of the National Museums of Kenya, the files of which are now apparently lost.
This legal blow means that Suchan Investments, Ltd. will most likely continue its onslaught of the property this fall, pending the outcome of the injunction review in September.
Even if Suchan Investments win this round of the battle, there are still options for Sandeep to keep up the fight, including a bid for the Supreme Court. But can he hold out against mounting pressure for much longer?
“We have a right to file contempt of court, but then there is the palpable fear that at any moment a gang of goons from Kibera will come in and really distress again, so, no, there is no peace for me here,” says Sandeep.
(To be continued…)
