Sigh of relief as Mutukula prison land developers receive lease offers
A section of former prison land where private developers secured leases in Mutukula town council. PHOTO | ISSA ALIGA
What you need to know:
- In 2011, Rakai District acquired more than 2,200 acres of land at the Mutukula border from Uganda Prison Services after agreeing to relocate the prison facility to another place outside the town.
Individual developers who acquired plots on Prison land in Mutukula Town Council, Kyotera District have a reason to smile after the district authorities decided to give them lease offers which they have been pushing for the last eight years.
In 2011, Rakai District acquired more than 2,200 acres of land at the Mutukula border from Uganda Prison Services after agreeing to relocate the prison facility to another place outside the town.
The Prison Services remained with 500 acres and 2,200 acres were given to the district. When Kyocera was carved out of Rakai District in July 2017 the former inherited the 2,200 acres of land.
According to Mr Tom Matovu, the Kyotera District land officer, all individuals who paid for their plots of land including those applied before Kyotera became a district are going to get lease offers.
"There were some discrepancies after people paid for their leases because the officers in Rakai could allocate people land without coming on the ground, which causes misunderstandings among the developers,” he said in an interview on Monday
Mr Matovu revealed that the process of allocating plots to individual developers was midway hijacked by fraudsters who presented fake receipts claiming to have bought different plots of land from Rakai District authorities, which wasn’t true.
"We experienced a problem of fraudsters who claimed to have bought land before, but it's good we got in touch with our counterparts in Rakai and we managed to scrutinize all the claimants and got the right ones,” he added.
Some of the affected developers claim they paid between Shs720,000 and Shs 750,000 per acre to officials at the Rakai District land office to obtain the leases before Kyotera became a district.
Mr Iddi Kazibwe, a developer claims he bought his plot of land and constructed a residential house on it, but the district physical planner, Ms Olivia Nakaliri threatened to demolish it, saying it was illegally constructed on the land.
“We are asking the Inspector General of Government to investigate why the district leaders want to evict us and give the same land to other people,” he said
Ms Olivia Nakaliiri, the Kyotera District physical planner, said all individual developers with genuine receipts are eligible to get the same size of the land they purchased from Rakai authorities even if it's not in the same original area to allow proper planning of the area.
She said since Mutukula is strategically located at the border and rapidly growing into a business hub, they want to see well-planned settlements rather than slums of some sort.
"Mutukula is a border town which we expect to harbour a large population in the near future. If we plan it poorly, the future population will have to suffer. We, therefore, can't allow individuals to just build houses anyhow, anywhere, we are going to plan for them accordingly,” she said.
Mutukula which was recently elevated from a town board to a Town council is one of the fastest-growing towns in the Greater Masaka area due to its strategic location and being at the Uganda-Tanzania border.
