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Displaced Sabiny struggle to regain land 80 years later
Mr Jackson Kwarat, a resident of Binyiny in Kween District, points at his empty granary last week. He urges the government to help him and several others regain their land. PHOTO/DAVID AWORI
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Displaced by past insurgencies and land grabbers, families struggle to reoccupy their land, and also suffer food insecurity.
In the heart of Binyiny Village, Binyiny Town Council in Kween District, resides Mr Jackson Kwarat, 69. His eyes gaze upon an empty granary, once envisioned as a bountiful sanctuary to feed his family of eight, but for years now, it remains devoid of harvest he so longingly seeks to store.
“I constructed this granary, hoping to use it as a food store, but because I didn’t realise any good harvest each season, it is usually empty,” he said in an interview last week.
Despite his age, Mr Kwarat says he now must undertake odd jobs in people’s gardens or at the nearby trading centre, where he is paid Shs5,000 per day to buy food, support his extended family and treat his ailing wife.
He says he has managed to acquire a small plot of land in a rocky area and constructed three makeshift shelters.
However, due to the rocky terrain, excavating a pit-latrine is hard task, forcing his family and many others to practice open defecation, which puts them at risk of contracting Cholera.
Mr Kwarat, who is among the more than 20,000 Sabiny families, claiming land in the vast fertile plains that cover part of Kween and Bulambuli districts, says he lacks land to cultivate food.
The families’ ancestors were displaced by the insurgence in the early 1940s by Karimojong cattle rustlers and later in 1987 by rebels of the United People’s Army (UPA) led by Peter Otai and Holy Spirit Movement insurgents led by Alice Lakwena.
But despite the end of the insurgency in the 1990s, Mr Kwarat and many other families are unable to reoccupy their ancestral land due to land grabbers.
Mr Tom Mutai, a claimant, says the land covers 6,800 sqkms, including Ngenge, Kamungai, Nanam, Kamunkenje, Katapchechamiri, Kawamustil, Korosi I and II, Sukongong, and Chekwesata.
A land verification commission led by the former deputy Inspector General of Police, Mr Julius Odwe, on the directive of President Museveni in 2012, established that as early as 1948, the area under contention was occupied by the Sabiny, Bagisu, and Nandi.
Other minority groups include the Banyole; but because of insecurity, the ethnic communities were forced to vacate the area.
The Odwe verification report, which the Daily Monitor has seen, noted that between 1948 and 1949, the Karimojong carried out 20 major livestock raids on the communities that left 1,964 head of cattle stolen and nine people killed, further pushing the inhabitants from the land.
The report suggests that 75 percent of the land was occupied by the Sabiny, 10 percent was for the Bagisu, 10 percent the Nandi, while 5 percent belonged to other ethnic communities that comprised the Iteso, Babukusu and Banyole.
On September 1, 2009, President Museveni wrote to Mr Omara Atubo, then Lands minister, to ensure a boundary demarcation between Sironko and Kapchorwa following colonial maps, suspend surveys and caveats, investigate, and cancel land titles which were irregularly awarded.
The minister was to report to the President within three months, but without any action takewwn, the Sabiny land claimants moved and occupied the said land; but due to fear of violence and interference with the investigations and land demarcation process, police and army were deployed to disperse the group.
Mr Jackson Bushendin, a claimant, says whereas various commissions and investigation teams, including ministers, had been sent to the area, the plight of the people who were the original inhabitants as early as 1870s were yet to be addressed.
Mr Mutai says failure to implement the findings would compromise the teams by the rich and highly-placed groups and companies that are on the said land. “We are in pain because for all these years, the government we serve and support has failed to protect us against land grabbers who are now using state institutions to arrest and intimidate us,” Mr Mutai said.
Mr Wilfred Yeko, another claimant, reveals that the insurgence dispersed the Sabiny community with several leaving the fertile belt for Busoga, Bukwo, Kenya, Tororo and Busia.
Mr Mutai, a member of the Sabiny Land Claimants’ Association, a body which was formed to push for the land rights of the displaced families, says many Sabiny and others continue to live in misery.
“We have suffered intimidation from the office of the Kween Resident District Commissioner, and other state agents, who have kept threatening us with arrests,” Mr Mutai said.
In protest, the land claimants, waving placards, marched to the RDC’s office to express their displeasure against the alleged illegal detention wof some of their members by security.
Authorities say
Ms Hope Atuhaire, the Kween RDC, however, denies working for the land grabbers and revealed that whoever was arrested was running “extortion rings”, including allegedly soliciting Shs100,000 from unsuspecting members of the public while promising to give each of them five acres of the disputed land.
She said some individuals made attempts to declare their own ‘district’ within the contested region, cautioning that security agents would not stand idly by as such illegal actions fostered further problems.
Mr Mutai accuses the RDC of being compromised by land grabbers and using her office to intimidate the land claimants; however, Ms Atuhaire says there was no way her office would have been compromised by the said land grabbers who she does not even know.
Instead, she says her office had an obligation to ensure that there was sanity in the area.
