UGANDA, Kampala | Real Muloodi News | The government is calling on citizens to register their land with the Ministry of Lands as a measure to protect against land grabbing and forced evictions.
Small-scale farmers have expressed numerous complaints about being displaced by investors and politicians who exploit their unregistered land.
Mr Dennis Obbo, the Ministry of Lands’ spokesperson, stated that the ministry receives a lot of complaints from the public about land grabbing, but the majority of the people have unregistered land.
To address the issue of land grabbing, the government has secured funding from the World Bank.
“The Ministry of Lands will focus on customarily land tenure systems in 32 districts, primarily in the northern, northern eastern, and Busoga regions,” Mr Dennis Obbo said.
Uganda is rich in natural resources, including abundant gold deposits and nickel-platinum group minerals and rare earth elements in the eastern region.
However, this rush for minerals has raised concerns among locals as they face displacement from their ancestral lands.
While acknowledging that some farmers may have encroached on swamps and wetlands in violation of Ugandan law, Mr Hakim Balirane, the vice chairperson of the Eastern and Southern African Farmers Forum, calls for equal treatment from the government.
He points out that while local communities are facing evictions, foreign investors, like the Chinese, have been allowed to extract development minerals and grow crops on the same lands.
Allegations have emerged that many evictors use coercion and falsified paperwork to remove people without land titles, especially in areas with valuable mineral deposits.
This further highlights the need for mass land registration to protect vulnerable communities from exploitation and forced evictions.
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