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Otuke residents take govt to court over land, demand compensation
Claimants at a consultative meeting at Aloni, Iceme Sub-county in Oyam District recently. PHOTO BY BILL OKETCH
What you need to know:
Land wrangles. The residents say the government went against its earlier promise to compensate them over land used to set up a school.
Residents of Aliwang Ward in Otuke District have dragged the government to court for allegedly throwing them out of their ancestral land to pave the way for the construction of a secondary school.
The 11 residents, headed by Ms Grace Akullo Oker, are now asking court to order the government to compensate them for their 400-acre piece of land which was given to Adwari Secondary School and commissioned by President Museveni in 2007.
In a letter dated August 23 to the Attorney General, the claimants, through their lawyers, want the court to block the school from using the land unless they are paid Shs7 billion.
Ms Oker said the government started illegally using their land in 1997 at the peak of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency but has since failed to respect their earlier agreement regarding payment.
“We now want the land back if the government cannot pay us for the land on which it established the school. We now live like squatters with nowhere to bury our dead,” she said.
In a July 9, 2010 letter written by the then head teacher of the school, Mr Alfred Awio, to the complainants, he emphasised the importance of the school to the area, calling on government to consider compensating the affected people.
He also warned that failure to settle the matter would affect the normal operations of the school.
However, the residents said the government has since turned a deaf ear to their plight, leaving them stranded. “Early this year, when we wanted to bury our grand child on part of the land, the school management barred us from doing so. Now, when any of my relatives die, I don’t know where I will bury them,” Ms Oker said.
Government documents
Documents seen by the Daily Monitor indicate that the line ministries last year recommended the release of Shs9 million for a government valuer to survey the land but since then, no results are evident on ground.
However, Mr Daniel Omara Atubo, a former minister of Lands, who is also a resident of the area, asked the concerned parties to expedite the assessment of the land so that the aggrieved parties are compensated.
The school comprises about 1,000 students, 35 teachers and an unspecified number of non-teaching staff. Since the end of the insurgency by the Lord’s Resistance Army, northern Uganda has been embroiled in land wrangles.
In September this year, residents of Apaa Village, Pabbo Sub-county in Amuru District, sought audience with President Museveni over escalating land wrangles between them and the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA).
UWA has in the recent past evicted 6,000 residents from a disputed piece of land in Apaa that the Authority says belongs to East Madi Game Reserve. However, residents claim the 825 square kilometers of land is their ancestral property.
