UGANDA, Kiboga | Real Muloodi News | The Minister for Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Judith Nabakooba, has disclosed that the “government is profiling powerful individuals involved in land grabbing across the country.”
On December 14, 2022, Nabakooba addressed local authorities and citizens in Kiboga District, expressing concern that some wealthy individuals and influential government figures are directly engaging in land grabbing while others are doing so through “their well-connected agents.”
“Some [top government officials] have gone ahead to grab land that accommodates government institutions with the sole aim of hoodwinking the government to use the Land Fund to pay them. We have concrete information about this clandestine move and we will not allow it to happen,” the minister addressed the gathering at the district office.
According to Ms Nabakooba, people who incite land disputes and remove low-income tenants are enemies of the NRM government.
“I recall very well that since the NRM government took over power in 1986, people have been saying we can sleep however much we are poor and now the enemies are struggling to take that away by evicting the wananchi from their ancestral land,” Nabakoba said and added that the government is now determined to defend the peasants.
She said that President Museveni recently established a commission under the leadership of Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja to address concerns over evictions in national protected areas like forest reserves.
“That committee is responsible for handling land issues from areas where government has interest, but with a proper relocation plan for the sitting tenants,” she explained.
The National Forestry Authority (NFA) would be expected to submit findings to the committee, which will then transmit them to President Museveni for further action, as per the new system.
Land possession has remained a contentious subject in many regions across Uganda, where affluent landowners have been known to forcibly remove impoverished tenants from their ancestral lands under the pretext that they are doing so illegally.
Based on this, the government is promoting land reforms that, according to State authorities, “are aimed at curing the country’s rampant evictions.”
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