Land grabbbing in Uganda

The road to Nakaseeta village in Mubende district in central Uganda is dusty and full of potholes. It leads to a coffee plantation on land that was once home to more than thirty thousand people.

Peter Kayiira is the lead petitioner in a court battle that's been going on for nine years between the former residents of Nakaseeta and the Kaweri Coffee Plantation. Kaweri was allocated eleven square miles (28.5 square kilometers) for its plantation for which many people - some estimates put the figure at over two thousand - were forcibly evicted by the Ugandan army, the UPDF, in 2001.

Eviction was 'like war'

Kayiira lives in a small thatched house located just outside the plantation. He recalls the eviction. "It was like war. Hundreds of soldiers were deployed with live ammunition, they were beating up people, it was total chaos, " he told DW. "When I organised the people to go to court, many said 'no, Peter, these people will come back and kill us. Now that they have left us alive, let's go and start a new life.' Some were beaten or had their properties set on fire."

Nalwadda Nalongo says she was promised land and money if she agreed to move. She now lives with her husband and five children in Namwasa forest in a small mud and wattle house, intended to be only a temporary structure. She claims that she was thrown off her land and now has to live as a tenant, paying rent to someone else. "I beg the government to stop taking people's land. I know we are not the last," she said. "We have a land title but what use is that? You lose your own land and become a beggar."

In a separate case, also in Mubende district, land was allocated to a British timber company. The New Forests Company claims to be the biggest tree planter in Uganda, planting idigenous species as part of an environmental conservation effort. But according to British charity Oxfam, twenty thousand people were evicted between 2006 and 2010.

Lack of compensation

The evictions were authorised by President Yoweri Museveni in a letter which claimed the villagers were encroaching on the forest. The president also ordered that all families who had been living on the land allocated to the Kaweri Coffee Plantation before 1992 should receive compensation. However, this correspondent has seen evidence that only five familes were considered eligible.

The Ugandan judicial system is currently dealing with more than two hundred cases involving communities that have been evicted as groups. The number of individual evictions is put at more than fifty thousand.

Author: Alex Gitta, Kampala / sh
Editor: Mark Caldwell/mik