Kamagut–Kiplombe and Isiolo: How Two Kenya Army Land Disputes Compare

By William Kiptoo

The Kamagut–Kiplombe land dispute in Uasin Gishu County and the long‑running Isiolo land disputes both revolve around land claimed by the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) for training and security installations, yet the two conflicts differ in origins, scale, community claims, and how the state has attempted to resolve them.

In Kamagut and neighbouring Kiplombe, the dispute dates back to the 1970s when civilian families settled on land adjacent to Moi Barracks Recruits Training School, cultivating and building without title deeds even as the land was officially classified as defence land, a situation that persisted for decades due to weak enforcement and poorly marked boundaries. In Isiolo, by contrast, community members trace their claims further back, often describing the land as ancestral community land inherited over generations, with some residents stating they lived there as early as the 1920s, long before the establishment or expansion of major military installations such as the School of Infantry, School of Artillery and other KDF facilities.

Another key difference lies in the scale of the contested land and the number of people affected. In Kamagut–Kiplombe, approximately 1,200 families claimed between 4,000 and 5,000 acres, and the dispute, though violent, was geographically concentrated around specific farms and military buffer zones near Eldoret. In Isiolo, residents in areas such as Burat and Ngaremara have accused the KDF of occupying or expanding into more than 18,000 acres, affecting tens of thousands of people across multiple ethnic communities and administrative wards, making the dispute broader and more complex.

The human cost also unfolded differently. In Kamagut, unresolved access restrictions and confrontations escalated into deadly clashes, with three residents killed in 2021 and five youths killed in November 2023, bringing the death toll linked directly to the dispute to eight and triggering national outrage. In Isiolo, while tensions have been intense and evictions threatened, the conflict has largely played out through protests, court injunctions, and political pressure, with communities reporting displacement and loss of livelihoods but fewer confirmed fatalities directly attributed to clashes with the military.

State intervention has also followed different paths. In Kamagut–Kiplombe, the violence forced a decisive national intervention in March 2024, when the Ministries of Defence and Lands brokered a negotiated land‑sharing settlement that acknowledged the dispute had lasted nearly five decades and allocated about 5,000 acres to residents, with surveying and titling promised as part of a final resolution. In Isiolo, the approach has been more incremental, relying on technical committees, court‑ordered status quo arrangements, and investigations by the National Land Commission into historical land injustices, with no single comprehensive settlement yet implemented across all contested areas.