This week President Yoweri Museveni disbanded the land unit
operating out of state house and handed over their function to a special
committee in the Lands ministry.
On Tuesday lands state minister Aidah Nantaba who heads the
committee got off to a running start announcing that they had identified at
least 500 land titles that should be rescinded.
The committee consists of officials from the police, UPDF,
solicitor general’s office and the judicial service commission.
The committee is on some Robin-Hood mission to save peasants
from illegal evictions. The minister has already cut herself out as the scourge
of the large landowners, staying evictions and resettling people with much
bombast and drama.
In the process the junior minister has won much popularity
among the squatters and has not endeared herself to many landowners, many of
whom are legitimate landowners and have been hard done by her overbearing ways.
Uganda’s land tenure system – most of which is informal and
may not stand up in a court of law, is fraught with problems and is politically
sensitive. It is also hampering farm productivity and holding back agricultural
commercialization.
The way to handle this is to regularize the land tenure
system so the established institutions like the Uganda land commission, police
and courts of law can handle land issues – as they are supposed to.
As it is now by perpetuating, even accentuating, the
informality of the land ownership by creating parallel structures we are doing
more harm than good.
The government needs to bite the bullet. Fund the land
tribunals proposed in the land law and step aside as the relevant institutions
take the lead in sorting out land issues.
The challenge of course is that not only will the process of
regularizing land ownership be a long and arduous process, but it might very
well anger a lot of rural people who have settled on land that is not
rightfully theirs and may go from land lords to squatters in a blink of an eye.
The reason there is no systematic action being taken on the
land issue is the realization that these kind of “pretend” owners maybe a
significant enough number as to cause a political threat. So apolitical
decision has been made to kick the tin down the road, postponing any real
action on resolving the issue at worst or at best employ someone to kick up a
storm and make as if something is being done about the issue.
The land issue is critical for our ambitions to take this
country to middle income in the next three decades, one because by regularizing
the tenure system and in effect commoditizing land you can have the land
becoming more productive and raising incomes of the land owners and the people
they employ on the land.
And secondly, how the government handles land ownership
rights sends a powerful signal to not only people wanting to go into
agriculture but also to investors interested in other asset classes. The logic
would go that if the government can be so blasé about land ownership what’s to
stop them from waking up one day and doing the same to real estate, plant and
machinery?
From a political point of view it probably not in a seating
government’s interest to regularize the land tenure system. As mentioned before
it may cause a lot of tempers to flare and hurt them at the polls. But also if
land is regularized and taxed we can expect those unable to pay tax to sell out
and migrate to the cities, fail to be gainfully employed and resort to crime
and provide fertile ground for a credible opposition to launch itself from.
That is politics.
Something has to give. Either the government takes the tough
decisions – regularize land tenureship and tax the land, regardless of the
political fallout, knowing that it will be benefit the country in the long run
or go on sidestepping the issue and hold back progress for decades.
