During the sunset years of former president Mwai Kibaki’s regime, vast stretches of land in Lamu on Kenya’s Coast were illegally allocated to a group of speculators targeting the multi-billion Lamu Port and South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (Lapsset) project.

Last week, as he announced immediate revocation of the allocations, President Uhuru Kenyatta revealed the names of 22 private companies that received the more than 500,000 acres, which represent about 70 per cent of total arable land in that county.

The announcement by President Kenyatta puts the massive infrastructure project at the centre of the instability rocking Lamu, and reinforces the Kenyan administration’s position that “local political networks” were behind the recent wave of attacks at the Kenya Coast.

This raises the question: Is Lapsset fuelling the conflict at the Coast?

When the idea of the project was first made public six years ago, there was a surge in land transactions in the county by speculators who wanted to flip it into profit by either selling to other speculators or the government.

While the project is a boon for contractors and highly placed individuals, it poses a grave risk for thousands of Lamu residents who could already have been dispossessed of their land by speculators.

A local activist requesting anonymity said foreigners, wealthy elites, government officers and politicians have bought all the land where the port will be put up, all the way to Kiwayu near the border with Somalia.

Hence President Kenyatta’s unprecedented move to address the land question at the Coast has been well received by the residents.

“We can now see the president is starting to work on the land problem in Lamu… we have had wealthy individuals saying they own ranches in this county and yet they don’t even own a single cow,” Abubakar Al-Amudy, who heads the Save Lamu Coalition, told The EastAfrican.

Farah Maalim Mohammed, a former deputy speaker of the National Assembly and a member of the opposition CORD, said the president’s move was an acknowledgement that Lamu people were criminally dispossessed of their land forcing the “once peaceful people to resort to violence to reclaim their rights.”

However, he said, the president needs to go further than that. “The first thing is to ensure that locals are given the legal instruments to own the land. Later on, it would not be a problem when people start relating on the basis of willing seller, willing buyer,” said Mr Mohammed.

Local residents believe the conflicts at the Coast are a “Trojan horse” by the elite landowners to displace them from land near big government projects.

Similarly, developments proposed in the Tana Delta by the government and private corporations are likely to result in large scale displacements.

For example, Mumias Sugar Company plans to turn 20,000 hectare into a sugarcane plantation, while a Canadian firm Bedford Biofuels, has 45-year lease agreements with six ranches with a combined area of 164,000ha. One of the companies named in President Kenyatta’s list of land-grabbers in Lamu, Mat Internation also wants to put up a 30,000 hectare sugar plantation.

These planned developments have fuelled a scramble for land at the Coast, where the government, local and foreign-owned corporations are positioning themselves to exploit the resources of the region at the expense of landless locals.