Let’s use land probe to weed out fraudsters

The Commission of Inquiry into Land matters in the country has been informed that one person in Mbale fraudulently presented himself to the Departed Asian Property Custodian Board as the rightful beneficiary and repossessed dozens of properties belonging to other people. This syndicated fraud has since triggered property disputes in Mbale.
However, this incident is just a small version of what the Commission has encountered throughout its investigations into land grabbing and mismanagement across the country. There have been similar reports of land stealing in other districts where fraudsters, especially government officials and the rich, have grabbed huge chunks of land belonging to either government or other people and organisations.
This impunity of land grabbing must be stopped. People have been killed, families displaced and property destroyed in parts of the country because of this prevalent vice.
The Justice Bamugemereire Commission, now in advanced stages of its investigations, will make its findings and recommendations in its report and a lot of taxpayers’ money has been spent on facilitating its work.
This substantial public expenditure should not go to waste as has been largely the case for reports of previous commissions. The public is losing confidence and hope in commissions of inquiry because the experience from previous public inquiries, has been merely exposing the culprits in the media during public hearings. Nothing is done to the offenders after the commission has wound up its work and submitted the report. The ills continue as before.
The Bamugemereire Commission should recommend criminal proceedings and compensatory orders against the perpetrators of this land grabbing. In the past, we have had a series of commissions of inquiry into police, junk military helicopters, closure of banks, plunder of DR Congo natural resources etc, but nothing tangible came out of them as the culprits continued to walk scot free.
The huge amounts of taxpayers’ money spent on these public hearings became wasteful expenditure. The President and the government as a whole should ensure the Bamugemereire Commission does not suffer the same fate. The land grabbers and their accomplices have not only bred widespread hostility between individuals and communities but have also accelerated environmental degradation.
They must be made to pay the ultimate price for their unscrupulousness. They should be prosecuted and compelled to make good of the damage they have done either on land in case of environmental degradation or compensation in case of the dispossessed rightful beneficiaries.
Let’s use the Bamugemereire Commission to restore sanity in land acquisition, ownership and administration in the country.

The issue: Land probe
Our view: Let’s use the Bamugemereire Commission to restore sanity in land acquisition, ownership and administration in the country.