Kenya's Imenti forest is for everyone — until someone important needs a golf course

Meru County's Imenti forest — a green lung on the eastern flank of Mount Kenya, a catchment for rivers that supply tens of thousands of smallholdings and the town of Meru itself — has surfaced twice in the national press in the space of 24 hours, and the two stories say more together than either does alone.

The first, reported by the Daily Nation on 16 June 2026, concerns a proposed excision of more than 100 acres of forest land for the construction of a state lodge, an airstrip and a golf course. The second, also carried by the Daily Nation the same day, concerns a forest that is being used, in the absence of functioning disposal infrastructure in the surrounding wards, as a dumping ground for used disposable nappies. Read in sequence, the two reports are a small, contained case study in how a public good — a water tower, a carbon sink, a biodiversity reservoir — is treated as an asset that can be carved up, paved over, or soiled depending on who needs it and when.

The excision

According to the Daily Nation's report on the proposed Imenti forest excision, more than 100 acres have been earmarked for transfer out of forest reserve status to make way for a presidential-style state lodge, a companion airstrip, and a leisure golf course. The exact gazette notice, the date of the original excision order, and the ministry under whose authority the carve-out would proceed are not detailed in the report; the Daily Nation frames the project as a "controversy" already active in the public conversation in Meru. The economic logic on offer is the standard one: a prestige tourism asset, an access route for senior officials, local construction jobs, and the prestige that comes with hosting a state function in a high-altitude setting.

The forest itself does not appear in the public conversation with anything like the same prominence. Imenti is one of the five main blocks of the Mount Kenya forest reserve, and like the others it performs a set of tasks that no lodge, however grand, can replace: it regulates the flow of rivers feeding the Tana basin, it stabilises soils on slopes that, once denuded, do not recover within a human lifetime, and it hosts a closed-canopy ecosystem that smallholder coffee and tea farmers in Meru and Tharaka-Nithi depend on indirectly for micro-climate and pest regulation.

The diaper waste

A separate Daily Nation dispatch, also dated 16 June 2026, documents a different kind of pressure on the same forest: used disposable nappies, dumped in growing volumes because the surrounding wards lack the collection capacity to keep up with what households generate. The report describes a forest edge that is being treated, in effect, as a communal tip. The consequences are predictable. Nitrile and superabsorbent polymer do not biodegrade on any useful timescale. Leachate from a diaper mound in a steep tropical-forest catchment is, in sanitary terms, a slow-release contamination event for the rivers below. The tourism, recreation, and biodiversity values that justify protecting the forest are not threatened by the diaper waste in the same way as by an excision — but the underlying premise is the same: that a forest reserve is a place where externalities can be externalised.

What both stories share

Read together, the two pieces describe a single governance failure wearing two different uniforms. In one case, the failure is the political class's instinct to treat protected land as a discretionary ledger, with debits taken against it whenever a prestige project needs a site. In the other, the failure is the municipal state's inability — or unwillingness — to provide the basic waste-management service that would keep household refuse out of the catchment in the first place. Neither failure is a story about a single rogue actor. Both are stories about an institutional posture in which a forest is treated as residual space, available for the most insistent demand placed on it at any given moment.

The structural frame is not exotic. Across the region, water towers on the continent's major ranges — Mount Kenya, the Aberdares, Mount Elgon, the Rwenzoris, the Ethiopian Highlands — have been trimmed, excised, settled, replanted, and rezoned under a long sequence of legitimate-sounding purposes, with cumulative consequences for downstream water security that no single decision-maker is asked to account for. The pattern is not unique to Kenya. What is distinctive here is that the pressure is being reported on the same day, from the same outlet, on the same mountain block, in two registers that should embarrass the relevant ministries into a single, joined-up response.

Who wins, who loses, and what is contested

If the excision proceeds, the immediate winners are the contractors who build the lodge, airstrip, and course; the political principals who use them; and the small service economy in the surrounding wards that benefits from visiting delegations. The losers are downstream water users in Meru and along the Tana tributary systems, the smallholder farmers who depend on stable forest-edge micro-climates, and the public fisc, which typically underwrites the construction and recurring security costs of such facilities without ever recovering them at auction. If the diaper dumping continues unchecked, the immediate winners are the households with one less logistics problem; the losers are the same downstream users, plus the tourism and biodiversity values of the forest edge.

The contested terrain is narrower than it looks. The Daily Nation reports do not include a defence of the excision from the relevant ministry, or a rebuttal of the waste-management critique from the county government. The standard counter-argument in such cases — that a state lodge of this kind is offset by a compensatory reforestation programme elsewhere, or that the airstrip will support medical evacuations and tourism — does not appear in the cited reporting and is not asserted here. What is asserted, on the evidence available, is that the forest is being asked to absorb two unrelated costs at the same moment, and that the institutional response, so far, has been to treat each as a separate story.

The minimum that a credible response would have to include is a halt to the excision pending an environmental and hydrological impact assessment, a published terms-of-reference for that assessment, and a county-level waste-management plan that takes the diaper problem out of the catchment within a defined timeline. None of that requires new law. It requires the same institutions that proposed the lodge to act, in the same news cycle, on the waste story as well.

This publication treats the two Daily Nation reports as a single news event — one forest, two pressures, one missed opportunity for a joined-up answer.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/DailyNation