Words and Ideas: Commitment, Continuity and Irreversibility 147then on the continuing costs of rehabilitating and maintaining the scheme. For
each generation of government officers, and for local politicians, the easier course
was always to keep it going. Moreover, commitment can hardly have been dimin-
ished by the scheme’s location in the constituency of Daniel arap Moi, the long-
time powerful President of Kenya. The opportunity cost of the funds devoted
annually to maintaining the project must have been high, indeed.
The history of the rice-growing Mwea Irrigation Settlement is a contrast.
From its inception, it was economically more viable. But, increasingly, during
the 1990s farmers’ incomes were hit by dues deducted by the management, heavy
charges for milling and marketing, and competition from cheap rice imports
with liberalization. The centralized administration, seen in earlier days as a
strength of the Mwea scheme (Giglioli, 1973; Veen, 1973), gave scope for much
resented corruption. Cross-subsidization also took place from Mwea to Perkerra
and other schemes. In 1998, farmers rebelled and took over the management,
milling and marketing. The next year two young men were shot dead in a con-
frontation with police (Kenya Human Rights Commission, 2000). In 2003,
negotiations were in progress to establish a new relationship between the Mwea
settlers and the NIB. Interestingly, the very continuity of the draconian rules and
centralized organization of the scheme can be seen as a factor leading to the
Mwea rebellion, and its end, for a time, as an administered scheme. The lack of
democracy, accountability and transparency, earlier thought to be a strength, had
become a liability.
Worldwide, administered agricultural settlement schemes became rare during
the 1980s and 1990s. There were fewer resources, less land and the state was in
retreat. In India, large- and medium-scale irrigation did not settle farmers, but
supplied water to farmers on the land that they already farmed. In Israel, the ide-
alistic and communal organization of the kibbutzim eventually came to an end.
Elsewhere, the state disengaged where it could from responsibilities to settlers.
Some exceptions to these trends do, though, stand out, ranging from the
tightly administered to the near chaotic. For example, on Palestinian land, the
closely protected, notoriously illegal Israeli settlements were precisely intended to
be irreversible forms of appropriation and colonization, excluding Palestinians
from their land. In Sri Lanka, in a humane but closely administered tradition, the
Mahaweli Development Authority continued to settle families on newly irrigated
land and to provide a high level of special services. In southern Africa, there were
limited programmes of buying out large European farmers and settling African
smallholders. In Ethiopia, despite the bad record of earlier population transfer
and resettlement, the early 2000s saw renewed attempts to resettle people from
the highlands to the lowlands. At the chaotic extreme, in Zimbabwe, self-settle-
ment of self-designated freedom fighters took place on commercial farms from
2001 onwards, carried out by force and with disastrous economic consequenc-
es.^15 In their different extreme ways, the Israeli and Zimbabwean governments
pursued or permitted settlement with gross disrespect for human rights and legal-
ity.