UGANDA, Nakasongola | Real Muloodi News | Last year, the Ugandan Parliament targeted 2023 to change Nakasongola and 14 other communities to city status.
However, residents of Nakasongola District are demanding land titles from the government under the Land Fund before the district attains city status, reports All Africa.
Authorities in Nakasongola District say the city will better serve residents when the residents assume land ownership rights. Currently, most of the district population, about 85 percent, occupy land owned by absent landlords.
Sam Kigula, Nakasongola District Chairperson, said many residents are reluctant to venture into development projects because they do not own the land they are living on.
Last year, the government announced that they had completed the process to enable them to issue free land titles to at least 1,300 households, after compensating the absentee landlords in eight villages across Kalungi, Kalongo, and Lwampanga sub-counties.
However, local leaders say the process has taken longer than anticipated. Their desire is compensation of land titles before city status.
“We fear that the process may not take off before the city status is rolled out. We should not have a city where the majority of our people are squatters. Nakasongola is among the top districts that government had earlier lined up as beneficiaries of the Land Fund, but our hope is fast fading,” said Mr Kigula at a council meeting last week.
Mr Noah Mutebi Wanzala, the Nakasongola County MP, said area legislators had requested for residents to benefit from the fund, but the programme has been delayed. “We shall continue demanding the Land Fund for our people. I am going to find out the status of the land titling project,” he said.
Mr Wanzala further said that the targeted beneficiaries of free land titles have for many decades been harassed by some absentee landlords through illegal evictions, destruction of property and injustices in land disputes.
“Unknown landlords destroyed the residents’ property over the years, harassed, evicted and unjustly treated,” Kigula says.
The Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Urban Planning (MLHUP) say the Land Fund enacted as a multipurpose Fund under the 1998 Land Act Chapter 227, 41(4 (a,b,c and d). The act gives loans to tenants to acquire land, government to purchase land, for government to resettle landless people and help Ugandans gain land titles. The Land Fund stands at 50.2 billion shillings, according to a PML Daily report of May 2020.
But The Independent in 2020 reported that the government allocates insufficient funds to the Land Fund annually. Persis Namuganza, the then State Minister for Lands, was quoted by The Independent as stating “the Land Fund requires 170 billion shillings for ten years, to fully settle approximately 8000 beneficiaries. Otherwise, it would take 80 years for the government to compensate them, if the government continues allotting 23 billion shillings to the Land Fund annually,” Namuganza said.
Following the guidelines of 2020 parliamentary approval of new cities, Nakasongola, the municipality, will attain city status. In 2021 eleven municipalities were elevated to city status. Four other communities, including Nakasongola, will achieve city status in 2023.
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