Nantaba-Kayihura feud exposes govt failure in handling land wrangles

The feud raises fresh questions about the government’s ability to approach and resolve to deal with the land question. Ms Nantaba accuses the IGP of allegedly siding with land grabbers in the district. The minister’s outburst comes after Gen Kayihura blamed her for the land wrangles in the district that have turned tenants against landlords.

In a rebuttal to her accusations of fomenting trouble in Kayunga last weekend, Gen Kayihura accused Ms Nantaba, who is also the district woman MP for Kayunga, of ‘unfairly’ accusing him yet he is in the district on the directive of President Museveni. At the end of a day-long tour of Kayunga on July 3, Mr Museveni promised to come up with a decision regarding the simmering wrangles between landlords and tenants in Kayunga, which have resulted in violent attacks and sometimes deaths.

Mr Museveni said: “I defeated former President Obote so these ones won’t beat me. Land is not like a handkerchief which you put in the pocket and walk away, we can always get the truth because we can trace the history. So I have come here as the judge and to find the truth.”

Six weeks later, however, Mr Museveni has not returned to Kayunga to deliver his “judgment” and instead Gen Kayihura, who says he is in the district on the President’s orders, has proved divisive, according to Ms Nantaba.

Problem from the past
Land matters seem to be taking up much of Mr Museveni’s time recently. On February 26, the President took time off from preparations for his father’s burial in Rwakitura to attend to urgent land matters. Following numerous evictions of tenants, Mr Museveni said Uganda risks having “internally displaced” people as a result of the emergence of a group of “Bayaaye-minded, nouveau-riche, pseudo capitalists”. The land problem has been changing face over the years, and widespread evictions in various parts of the country became most pronounced during Mr Museveni’s era. The problem had manifested slightly differently earlier.

When landlords imposed high land rents on tenants, for example, it gave rise to the Bataka agitation of the 1920s. The Bataka, the clan heads of Buganda, had been overlooked in the allocation of land in the 1900 Buganda Agreement, so they sided with the majority common people who were turned into tenants when their land was signed away to collaborating chiefs and the royal family.

The colonial government responded by passing the Busuulu and Envujjo law of 1928. Busuulu is land rent collected in cash while envujjo is collected in terms of produce. The law set a reasonable ceiling on land rents.

The problem assumed a new face after independence. Some of the land the colonial agreements had signed off to chiefs was tilled by people of different ethnicities from the new owners. It was the case in what became known as the Lost Counties, the counties that Buganda had taken over but voted in 1964 to return to Bunyoro. Baganda “absentee” landlords held titles to lands tilled by majority Banyoro. The same happened in parts of what is known as the Rwenzururu Kingdom, where titles for large chunks were held by “absentee” Toro landlords.

In response to these and other challenges, former President Idi Amin, through the 1975 Land Reform Decree, nationalised all land and converted mailo and freehold titles to leasehold. The decree made it practically impossible for tenants to be evicted from land.

Enter Museveni era
Amin’s decree was reversed by the 1995 Constitution and the Land Act 1998. Mr Museveni argued that whereas the problem of dual land ownership, a situation where the title holder and the tilling tenant both claim ownership of the same piece of land, is problematic, Amin’s measures had flaws. To some, this seemed like Mr. Museveni argument was that all the landlords had acquired their land through allocation by the colonialists when actually some of them had bought it.

The laws passed during Mr. Museveni’s rule practically reinstated the 1928 order, restoring dual land ownership while attempting to make it hard to evict tenants. The 1998 Land Act, for instance, set a nominal fee of Shs 1000 as annual rent payable by tenants to landlords for the use of their land. It also set stringent measures for eviction, requiring the landlord to sufficiently compensate the tenant if he wants to repossess the land. This means that tenants can only be evicted for nonpayment of rent, which is too low that most landlords are not motivated to collect it.

Faced with the reality that those who hold titles to land tilled by tenants could not get any reasonable value from it, many cheaply sold the titles to powerful individuals who could effect evictions. And the spate of evictions flew are now increasing out of control. These “bayaaye-minded” capitalists carrying out the evictions, Mr Museveni said at Rwakitura, connive with “corrupt local leaders, police and courts” to deprive a “still un-sensitised peasantry” of land.

Measures put up
The President has since announced urgent measures to deal with the land problem. He set up a committee to “go area by area returning people illegally evicted back to their bibanja (untitled land).” The committee would be chaired by Ms Nantaba, who tenants now love as much as landlords hate her.

For those claiming to have got court orders to evict tenants, Mr Museveni said, the government would seek verification of such orders from the Registrar of the High Court. Stern measures would be taken against those who illegally evict tenants, “including prosecution and forcing him/her to compensate the victims of his/her malicious and illegal actions”.

And, as a definitive solution to the land problem, Mr Museveni said the government would “intensify efforts to raise money for its land Fund so that the phenomenon of dual ownership of land in Buganda, Ankole, Toro and Bunyoro is ended”.

The fund would be used to buy off landlords so that the tenants assume complete ownership of the land they occupy. The fear of eviction aside, gaining full ownership of the land would economically empower the tenants and, for instance, enable them to contract loans using land as security.

Five months after Mr Museveni’s pronouncement, the budget was read and not a shilling was committed to establishing the Land Fund. In fact, the fund was never mentioned at all. Mr Museveni promised court activity around land matters and indeed there has been a lot recently. But it has flown in the opposite direction as landlords have filed cases against Ms Nantaba’s committee, accusing her of forcing back tenants who they say were duly compensated before eviction.

The government, at some point got concerned by the number of cases filed by aggrieved landlords to the extent that the landlords themselves also appealed to the President, accusing Ms Nantaba of acting illegally. Due to one or more of the above reasons, Mr Museveni seems to have softened towards landlords. On a visit to Kayunga in early July, the epicenter of recent land wrangles, Mr Museveni left some tenants disappointed. Ms Nantaba had invited the President over land wrangles and her constituents were very expectant. But Mr Museveni only promised to investigate and communicate his findings in two weeks.

But what if Mr Museveni finds that the tenants are in the wrong? Will he order their eviction? If he does, where will those who have no capacity to find alternative land to settle on and till, go? This is the heart of the problem, experts say, but Mr Museveni’s government has never moved to address it. The prevailing politics does not seem to favour pursuing what Mr Kintu Nyago, a former presidential aide who was on one of the land committees, calls “a radical solution” to the land problem.

Experts assert that it is clear that one of the main reasons leading to the increased cases of land conflict is the failure of the prevailing land tenure systems to respond to the challenges posed by appreciation of the value of land in a way that would enhance effective tenure security, thus rendering property rights deficient.

Expert opinion on the land conflicts in Uganda

In a 2006 paper titled, The Land Act 1998 and Land Reform in Uganda, Makerere University don Dr Juma Anthony Okuku criticised the land law for failing to deal with the fundamentals. He says what was needed in 1998 was a “radically distributive land reform where peasants would be given title deeds and not certificates of occupancy”. According to the 1998 law, a tenant who had stayed on a piece of land for a specified period would be recognised by being given a “certificate of occupancy”, on top of the title certificate held by the landlord.

For this reason, Dr Okuku argued, the “Land Act 1998 deviates from recent examples of countries like China and South Korea that have made tremendous transformation of their economies partly through land reforms”. “The law needs to abolish landlord-tenant relationships where they exist, not their restoration as in the Act,” Dr Okuku argued. But why was Mr Museveni’s government reluctant to adopt a more decisive stance towards the land question? Dr Okuku gives three reasons.

In the first place, he argues, by 1998 when the legislators passed the Land Act, “most of them had also become landlords” and had to legislate with their interests as landlords in mind. In fact, some of the people who have been accused of evicting tenants from land in the recent past held powerful positions within the establishment. Some of the tenants who face eviction claim that their tormenters work on behalf of powerful people in the government.

The second point Dr Okuku raises is that by 1998, the “broad-based” political arrangement the Movement came with, had come to an end and “the legitimacy of the NRM in Buganda was based on the alliance between NRM and the land lords”. “Resolving the land problem in favour of the tenants would immediately cause antagonism between the NRM and Buganda land lords,” Dr Okuku adds.

The third issue is the “mutual suspicion” that has always surrounded the land issue, with the Baganda fearing that the ruling group wanted to grab their land. “Acholi and other “communal areas feared that the law was meant to confuse them and take away their land,” Dr Okuku adds. These accusations are still alive and gaining currency.

In Acholi for example, only 17 per cent of the land is currently under cultivation, according to Prof Ogenga Latigo, a deputy president in the opposition Forum for Democratic Change and a prominent farmer in the area. But there have been animated exchanges over attempts by the sugar corporation, Madhvani Group, to set up a plantation in the area.

In the oil regions, there have been a number of evictions and fears abound that powerful people are attempting to take over large chunks of land for speculative purposes. The government, in particular Mr Museveni, seems bent on finding a way to have the landlord and tenants co-exist without ugly skirmishes but also without resolving the problem. This, Dr Okuku calls, “managing and not resolving” the land question.

“The politics of the day has made it practically impossible to pass strategic land reform laws,” he concludes.
In her June 2009 paper, Escalating land conflicts in Uganda, Margaret A. Rugadya, refers to Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment assertion that land conflicts will escalate in at least 30 districts in Uganda unless urgent measures are taken to resolve them. The conflicts talked about include border disputes with neighbouring countries, inter-district border disputes between landlords and tenants, and tenants resisting acquisition of land by investors. Land conflicts and disputes have become deadly, leaving parties dead or at least vowing to kill each other.

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