Buganda is not pleased with the continued government outbursts on the land tenure that they feel is letting down development.
President Yoweri Museveni on Heroes Day this year lambasted the Buganda mailo land system, telling the nation it is an evil system which should be reformed.
President Museveni disagrees with the system that subjects land ownership in Buganda to independent kingdom laws, customs, norms, and values.
The President charged: “Land owners should be entitled to full ownership of their land like elsewhere in Uganda. In Ankole, nobody can chase you away from your land. You even fear.”
The President’s fears come after the commission of enquiry he set up chaired by Catherine Bamugememeire unearthed myriads of anomalies with the land tenure system which has left so many in court squabbles.
However, Buganda Minister of Special Duties David FK Mpanga argues that the land question is a complex matter that requires calm heads to break it down for all stakeholders involved.
Mpanga, a prominent lawyer in the city, appeared on NTV The Spot show to weigh in on the ongoing debate that has every government official taking the President’s position.
The minister who is a technical lawyer on the matters relating land, thinks the conversation requires ‘level heads’.
Below is a complete submission of the Buganda minister Mpanga on the heated land tenure system in Buganda
We have heard matters said about land tenure, the Buganda kingdom is a large land owner in this part of the country. We have a lot to say, to gain and to lose from matters relating land tenure.
The view of the kingdom is very simple that matters relating to land tenure must be approached with level heads, even handedly and in a rational and calm way.
We don’t have proper courts, the district land tribunals which were set up to help move dispute resolutions closer to the ground were never funded, they collapsed.
We know from the Bamugemereire report that certain people who are not 1900 allocates of land have been misusing state power, court proceedings and sate security to acquire their wealth which they then put into land corruptly.
A mailo land owner (Kingdom of Buganda) is presumed to be a land grabber and absent land lord preventing people from developing but the contrary is true.
There is high pressure on land, its splitting families. Let’s look at land wrangles in the fullness of them. There are brothers and sisters who are fighting metaphorically in court and battling before various officials over land matters.
Do not demonize a land tenure system without thinking through the primary, secondary and tertiary consequences there of. Do not demonize people because the kingdom is people. Institutional land owners are ultimately people.
Why is that we have investors whose primary demand is for free land? There is no free land in Kenya. There is more industrialization and development in Kenya.
The Buganda kingdom runs on 5 tenets. Tenet number three is hard work and productivity. We want people to be hardworking and productive. Demonization of particular people does not help economic development or find solutions.
Nobody wants to keep land undeveloped. The deadlock that’s been caused by politicization, over populist and heated discussions around Mailo and other land tenures has made land development difficult.
You can’t survey your land without five or six permissions to determine a boundary because people think if there is a survey going on, suddenly there is a bad thing happening and that’s because of the heightened land disputes that have been endangered.
We need to bring people into arrangements that enable them to understand that if there is a development on land, it’s going to be mutually beneficial to a title owner, occupant and investor.
You don’t need to force people to sell land, show them the value that you are giving them.
Mirembe Villas is a very successful joint venture between the kingdom of Buganda and a Chinese investor.
When the Kingdom of Buganda says in it’s tenet that economic growth is a desired objective of the kingdom, it’s not merely rhetoric. It’s a very useful way in which the state could work together with the kingdom to do things that enable us to develop.
It’s not true that the Kingdom of Buganda was engaged in partisan politics, what is true is that the kingdom of Buganda is engaged in mobilization for development and public good.
The Buganda kingdom is much older than the British coming here, it has existed & will exist in some form for so long as there are people here who acknowledge the existence of a king, belong to clans, speak a certain language and aspire to certain things.
The moment a particular asset class is targeted for democratization be worried about whatever you have made because there is guy who doesn’t have shoes but you’ve got three pairs in your house, why? Give one pair of shoes to the other guy.
Why is your bank account beyond a million shillings when you can’t spend more than a million shillings in a day? We leave you with five hundred thousand and distribute the other five hundred.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FXkbtc0Ad4
Award winning journalist and writer who has worked as a stringer for a couple of acclaimed South Africa based German journalists, covered 3 Ugandan elections, 2008 Kenya election crisis, with interests in business and sports reporting.
