Ali AwDoll
In one eventful week, Kenya witnessed two seemingly unrelated stories that together reveal a deeper truth about ownership, stewardship, and our evolving relationship with nature and nationhood.
At State House, President William Ruto signed the Privatisation Bill, 2025, into law, a bold reform meant to overhaul underperforming state corporations. The Act, which repeals the outdated 2005 law, clears the way for the sale or partial divestment of at least eleven state enterprises. Its goal is to inject efficiency, innovation, and competitiveness into sectors long stifled by bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away in Kursi, Wajir County, a woman named Bishara Abdinoor made national headlines for an act of compassion that raised equally profound questions. For two years, she had cared for a cheetah she rescued as an orphaned cub, feeding, nursing, and protecting it with affection rare even among trained conservationists.
When Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) officers eventually confiscated the animal, ferrying it hundreds of kilometers away to Nairobi, public opinion split. Some hailed her compassion; others warned of the dangers of taming a wild predator. Yet many wondered, why must a cheetah raised in a wildlife rich region like Wajir be sent away when Northern Kenya itself holds vast, suitable habitats?
The irony is striking. Kursi sits only a stone’s throw away from the Sabuli Wildlife Conservancy, a community-led sanctuary where people and wildlife are meant to coexist in harmony. Yet the cheetah rescued and raised there was removed from the very landscape built to nurture coexistence.
In that moment, Bishara’s personal loss became a national metaphor, about who owns our wildlife, who benefits from it, and who gets to care for it.
KWS’s Lukewarm Relationship With Northern Kenya
The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), mandated to manage national parks and protected areas, secure wildlife habitats, combat illegal trade, and work with communities, has an extremely limited presence in Northern Kenya. The agency operates only one station in Garissa and a small outpost in Ijara, in a vast region that is home to diverse wildlife and the world’s last viable population of the hirola antelope. This minimal footprint makes reporting, surveillance, data collection, and compensation for human-wildlife conflict exceedingly difficult.
The cheetah recently relocated by KWS, wrongly reported on its X account as being petted by a woman in Garissa rather than Wajir, exposes a deeper problem: the agency’s uneasy relationship with the people of Northern Kenya, and a lingering misconception that wildlife is unsafe among local communities.
Ironically, this alienation persists even as reports indicate that al-Shabaab militants hunt wildlife for bushmeat whenever they cross into the region. These challenges could be mitigated through the creation of community conservancies and a stronger, more consistent KWS presence across Northern Kenya.
The Spirit of Privatization
Kenya’s new privatization framework is not merely about selling parastatals, it is about reimagining responsibility. It reflects a belief that private initiative, when properly regulated, can often deliver what government monopolies cannot, innovation, accountability, and measurable results.
That same philosophy applies to conservation. For decades, KWS has carried the heavy burden of protecting our flora and fauna. But the challenges, poaching, encroachment, climate change, have grown more complex. With limited resources and vast territories to cover, the state can no longer do it alone.
If private investors can revive dormant sugar mills, ports, and factories, why not invite them to co-manage wildlife habitats, fund sanctuaries, or establish private conservancies that complement national parks?
If private investors can breathe life into failing parastatals, why not entrust them with the stewardship of Kenya’s wildlife? Across the country, more than 160 privately or community managed conservancies, from Lewa to Ol Pejeta to the Northern Rangelands Trust, have already proven that shared ownership can work. Together, they cover millions of acres, demonstrating that conservation and commerce can coexist. Yet these remain islands of success in a sea of state dominated policy. The new Privatisation Act could be the spark that transforms compassion into policy, and isolated acts of care like Bishara’s into a sustainable conservation economy for Northern Kenya.
Learning from South Africa
In South Africa, private conservation is not an experiment, it is an institution. The country hosts nearly 9,000 privately managed wildlife properties covering about 62,000 square miles, almost triple the area under government parks.
Private sanctuaries like Shibula Lodge and the Daniell Cheetah Project demonstrate that conservation and commerce can coexist. They restore degraded lands, protect endangered species, and empower nearby communities through jobs, education, and shared revenue.
There, wildlife is not viewed merely as a national treasure but as a shared asset, one that flourishes when both the state and citizens have a stake in it.
Northern Kenya’s Untapped Potential
Northern Kenya, often dismissed as arid and desolate, may be the country’s next frontier for community and private conservation. Its vast rangelands across Wajir, Garissa, Mandera, Marsabit, and Isiolo are natural habitats for cheetahs, gazelles, ostriches, and other savanna species.
Imagine if these regions hosted licensed, locally managed conservancies supported by private investors, philanthropists, and eco-tourism operators. Such a framework would create jobs, reduce human wildlife conflict, and make conservation a source of livelihood rather than restriction.
In that future, Bishara’s cheetah would not need to be whisked away to Nairobi. It could thrive within a regulated, community owned conservancy in Wajir, cared for by locals, monitored by KWS, and sustained by public private partnerships.
A Call for Policy Innovation
The Privatisation Act, 2025, is an economic reform, but it also represents a mindset shift, from state control to shared responsibility. Kenya’s policymakers should extend that thinking to wildlife, culture, and heritage.
Creating a legal framework for private and community led conservancies could unlock new investment, enhance Kenya’s eco-tourism profile, and empower citizens like Bishara, whose instincts for care and preservation embody the very spirit of conservation.
The Cheetah and the Act
Both the cheetah and the Act tell Kenya’s story at a crossroads. One reflects the government’s trust in private enterprise, the other, a citizen’s quiet act of stewardship.
As Kenya embraces economic liberalisation, we must broaden that vision to include environmental stewardship. Let’s imagine a country where wildlife thrives under both public and private care, where compassion finds institutional support, and where the spirit of privatisation becomes not only an economic tool but a national ethos.
Because perhaps, in Bishara’s tender act of raising a cheetah, we glimpse the same belief that drives our economic reforms, that Kenya’s future is safest not in the hands of the state alone, but in the hands of its people.
About the Author:
Ali AwDoll is a Kenyan communication and public relations expert based in Garissa.