Last week the Kampala suburb of Kasokoso witnessed running battles between residents and the police, punctuated by tear gas.
This was a carryover from an incident the previous week in
which area mayor Mamerito Mugerwa was roughed up and his car torched.
Unsurprisingly this kind of violence and disregard for
authority has at its root a land dispute.
National Housing & Construction Corporation (NHCC)
claims ownership of the 250-odd acres of land in the area. Unfortunately over
the last decade or so encroachers have settled on the land, built permanent
structures and even buried their dead.
According to local authorities they had warned NHCC of the
creeping encroachment as long ago as 2005. I guess bureaucratic sloth or sheer
incompetence prevented management from enforcing their ownership rights at the
time.
So now NHCC is ready to develop the area and have come up against
stiff resistance from the residents, who may have no legal claim to the land,
but that fact may count for nothing in the face of the real fear that they may
lose their homes.
It is not by accident that land is becoming an increasingly
emotive subject.
Uganda has one of the highest population growth rates in the
world with our population projected to double every 20 years. A natural
extension of this growth is that we have the youngest population in the world
with more than half the population below the age of 15 years.
In addition there are increasing waves of internal
migrations, putting huge pressures on urban areas.
It will be interesting to see how this incident plays out.
Looking at it from afar it should look like a cut and dried
case. NHCC with the help of the law enforcement agencies exercising its
ownership rights should throw off the squatters and commence construction.
However one can expect politicians to jump into the fray and
justify the residents’ right to the land with some populist logic.
This is not the first such dispute and it will not be the
last and it has far reaching implication for national stability and sustained
economic growth.
To begin with NHCC may eventually get its way, but this will
unleash on our streets a few hundred homeless and desperate citizens – a
political headache at best or a trigger for widespread chaos at worst.
Economically the issue of land rights goes straight to the
heart of development ambitions. If there are questions about land rights or
their enforcement investment by anyone becomes very difficult.
To let the residents of Kisokoso have their way would send a
negative signal to people – locally and abroad who may have plans of investing
in the country. If squatters can dispossess legitimate land owners, what will
stop them doing the same to buildings, vehicles, plant and machinery, investors
will wonder.
But there is an even more nefarious underbelly to many of
these land wrangles.
A diabolical industry has grown around these land disputes.
Politicians and connected people sponsor some of these
people to camp and quickly develop on land owned by other people. These
“connected” people then either masquerade as arbiters by virtue of the
positions they hold in the central government or in the local administrations
and engage in an extortion racket under the guise of facilitating compensation
for the squatters.
A variation of the same theme is that they facilitate the
encroachment with a view to an eventual takeover of the land for themselves for
much less than the market value.
Land issues are a political time bomb in themselves but
government needs to come down hard on these shenanigans and nip these rackets
in the bud.
For political reasons government may choose to look the
other way, but they then risk the racket snowballing into a situation where
real estate development becomes a hazardous business dooming us to our slums
and poorly planned neighbourhoods.
It maybe too much to ask of a seating government to resolve
land issues once and for all but the costs of not getting a grip on these
issues will reverberate through history with many unforeseen consequences.
Look at Zimbabwe. After more than 20 years of feet dragging
on the issues of land redistribution, political expediency dictated that the
Robert Mugabe’s governments take drastic action a few years ago, allowing
illegal occupations of farm land to stand, decimating the country’s reputation
as the food basket of southern Africa and bring a once promising economy down
to its knees.
The wealth disparities in Zimbabwe underpinned by an unfair
landownership, a hangover from the colonial era are indefensible but what is
probably more unforgivable is Harare’s allowing the situation to fester long
after they had assumed the reins of power.
Ironically the gap between the rich and the poor is even
more dramatic now, more because the poorer have become poorer and more people
have fallen out of the middle class to join their downtrodden cousins.
The point is we should not see Kasokoso as an isolated
incident, another bit of drama or something that happens to “other people”, we
need to seat up and take notice because Kasokoso may very well be a sign of
things to come.
