A conman in pointed shoes and a rather familiar name entered the Land Office…

It all started with a random phone call. The man on the other end of the line said I had sold him a piece of land on the outskirts of Kampala a few years ago. His name and voice did not register, but the location rang a bell; many, many years ago, we had placed small land bets in different directions to see where the capital would grow. This location had lost – badly – and receded to the backburner.

Still, we hadn’t sold. But the caller said a man claiming to be me had. Mr Caller was now trying to sell on the land but “I” had gone missing, so he had tracked “me” down out of my hiding spot. He shared copies of the said transaction – all forgeries – and I politely advised him to contact the authorities to help him in his pursuit.

A few days later, however, another person called to say he had also been sold the same property by someone who happened to share not just my block and plot number, but my name too! I decided to get involved; I would contact myself and buy my plot from myself.

It took just a few hours and lots of phone calls to set up. But eventually my alter ego walked into a lawyer’s office to receive a deposit for the property. He looked much older than me and much smaller, like he could use a good meal, but he wore his crimes on his sleeves. It wasn’t the “sewing machine trousers” that gave him away but the pointed shoes so beloved of real estate brokers, and the crumpled handkerchief in his hands with which he constantly wiped his brow.

When he finally spoke, I noticed that the front top row of his mouth was missing three or four teeth, probably from a previous deal gone wrong. “Mr Kalinaki” said he had not brought the title due to the rushed nature of the transaction, but a version he had shared with one of his victims had earlier been proven to be a forgery. 

He also presented a national ID in “our name” and with his picture, but patently false details. He claimed, on paper, to be several years younger than me, although he looked like he was enjoying his young adult years by the time I was born.

Such crimes are becoming more frequent as the price of land increases, and as criminality becomes more gentrified. But they shouldn’t be. I remember briefly consulting on a World Bank-funded project in the mid-2000s to digitize and computerise the Lands Registry. The idea was that one could, at the scan of a code, prove the ownership of a piece of land and see all the transactions that had taken place involving it. Some of the top officials in the Lands Office did everything in their power to frustrate the project so that they could continue to issue fake and often multiple titles on the same pieces of land. The project has made some progress in recent years, but Lands remains a dark and dangerous alley through Crime Land.

Folks have been forced into all manner of schemes to protect their land from these crooks, from fencing it off or affixing caveats, to – my personal favourite – building small shrines and organising random night prayers every so often. So if you see your columnist one of these days covered in bark cloth, ashes and feathers worry not; he will probably just be returning from opening boundaries.

The fraud in land undermines investment, increases costs of possession, and wastes too much time in legal and physical wrangles. Technology and funds are available to build a fool-proof land registry; all we need is some leadership or a well targeted class action lawsuit against the officials who continue to perpetuate this criminality and profit from it.

The police, in waiting all along, eventually led the other Mr Kalinaki away in handcuffs. He is currently assisting them in investigations. If there are any others out there planning to impersonate me, please, please, I beg you; don’t do it in pointed shoes. 

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 

[email protected] 

Twitter: @Kalinaki