Kajiado Residents Reject Carbon Credits ‘Exploitative’ Deal With Foreign Firm, Calls for Probe

A grassroots uprising exposes the dark side of Kenya’s carbon credit boom as communities fight back against predatory contracts

In the sprawling rangelands of Kajiado County, where Maasai pastoralists have stewarded the land for generations, a new form of colonialism is taking root—one wrapped in the seductive language of climate action and carbon offsetting. What’s unfolding here should serve as a urgent wake-up call for anyone who believes that market-based climate solutions will save us from environmental catastrophe.

The recent protests at Oldonyonyokie Group Ranch, where community members chanted “No carbon! No carbon!” while waving sticks in defiance, represent more than local dissent. They embody a fundamental rejection of a system that commodifies the very landscapes these communities have protected for centuries, only to sell those “credits” to the highest bidder while leaving the actual stewards with crumbs.

The documents leaked to local media reveal a carbon credit industry operating with the moral clarity of a Victorian-era trading company. Consider the brazen audacity: a 40-year agreement that transfers all carbon rights from the Oldonyonyokie community to private brokers, with the community’s title deed modified to include “joint land ownership” for four decades. This isn’t partnership—it’s dispossession with a green bow.

The math alone should outrage anyone with a functioning conscience. While the community was promised 1,165 shillings ($9) per acre, the actual agreement specifies just 360 shillings ($2)—a bait-and-switch that would make a used car salesman blush. Meanwhile, these same carbon credits will sell for exponentially more on international markets, enriching intermediaries while the communities that actually maintain the ecosystems remain trapped in poverty.

A Pattern of Predation

What’s happening in Kajiado isn’t isolated—it’s systemic. Across 2.5 million hectares of the county’s rangelands, carbon brokers are quietly locking communities into decades-long contracts through a combination of deliberate obfuscation, false promises, and exploitation of information asymmetries. The Maasai Wildlife Conservation Trust, REDD+ projects, and soil carbon initiatives now control vast swaths of territory, often without the free, prior, and informed consent that Kenya’s own laws supposedly guarantee.

The residents’ petition exposes particularly egregious practices: “token payments to communities before proper measurement, verification or documentation processes, creating false expectations and eroding trust.” Some soil carbon projects proceed “without any scientific or credible measurements of carbon, making payment and carbon claims questionable.” This isn’t just bad business—it’s fraud dressed up as climate action.

The Kajiado situation crystallizes everything wrong with treating nature as a commodity and climate change as a market problem requiring market solutions. Carbon credits were supposed to create economic incentives for conservation while providing affordable offsets for corporations. Instead, they’ve created a new form of extractive capitalism where the Global North’s pollution is offset by appropriating the Global South’s landscapes.

The fundamental flaw in carbon offset markets isn’t technical—it’s moral. They allow the world’s biggest polluters to continue their destructive practices while outsourcing the burden of mitigation to the world’s most vulnerable communities. A oil company in Texas can keep drilling by purchasing credits from pastoralists in Kenya who must then constrain their traditional land use practices for decades.

The Real Climate Criminals

While Maasai communities face restrictions on their ancestral lands in the name of carbon sequestration, the world’s largest corporations continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at record levels. The cognitive dissonance is staggering: we’re asking people who contributed virtually nothing to climate change to sacrifice their livelihoods so that those most responsible can maintain business as usual.

Governor Joseph Ole Lenku’s 2023 decision to revoke all existing carbon credit agreements, citing corruption, was a rare moment of political courage. That brokers quietly returned months later reveals the tremendous pressure these communities face from an industry worth billions globally.

The brave residents of Ewuaso Oonkidong’i Ward who filed the petition demanding investigations aren’t anti-environment—they’re anti-exploitation. Their call for mandatory Free, Prior and Informed Consent, transparent monitoring systems, and equitable benefit-sharing arrangements overseen by county authorities represents a vision of climate action grounded in justice rather than profit.

Real climate solutions must begin with the communities who have been successfully managing these ecosystems for millennia. Instead of imposing external carbon frameworks, we should be learning from and supporting indigenous and traditional management systems that have proven their effectiveness over centuries.

This means direct funding for community-controlled conservation initiatives, guaranteed land tenure rights, and benefit-sharing arrangements where communities retain ownership and control over their carbon assets. It means recognizing that the people of Kajiado aren’t obstacles to climate action—they’re its most experienced practitioners.

The uprising in Kajiado represents something larger than a local land dispute. It’s a rejection of the fundamental premise that we can buy our way out of climate change while maintaining the same systems of extraction and exploitation that created the crisis in the first place.

As the county assembly’s Committee on Water, Environment and Natural Resources begins its investigation, they’re not just examining questionable contracts—they’re confronting the moral bankruptcy of an entire approach to climate policy. The world is watching, and the lessons from Kajiado’s rangelands may well determine whether climate action becomes a tool for justice or just another mechanism for the powerful to exploit the powerless.

The chants of “No carbon! No carbon!” echoing across Oldonyonyokie Group Ranch aren’t the sounds of climate denial—they’re the birth cries of climate justice. It’s time we listened.