First, it was State Minister for Lands Aida Erios Nantaba telling us about land grabbers in Kayunga, her home district.
Second, was in Amuru district. Several women stripped naked before the Minister of Lands Daudi Migereko and his Internal Affairs counterpart General Aronda Nyakairima. Reason? They have come to grab our land, the women thought.
Third, is in Soroti. Two women have been arraigned in court for stripping naked, ostensibly because they think Soroti University wants to grab their land.
The issue of land is a sensitive one the world over and in Uganda government even deemed it necessary to establish a full police unit to deal with land matters.
But how did we get here? Land grabbing in Uganda is so rampant and a walk around the primary schools in Kampala will bring you closer to the tale of the vice; all playing fields that belonged to Nakasero, Buganda Road, Shimoni Demonstration, Kitante and Nnabagereka have been taken over by land sharks, with some erecting shopping malls while others have turned the fields into car bonded warehouses. That is how pathetic the land grabbing issue can get; not even the educational institutions can survive the fraudulent acquisition waves set off by the grabbers.
And, given that this state of affairs seems to be obtaining with impunity, the ordinary people are now weary and suspicious of anyone who comes around purporting to have good intentions in regard to their land. In fact, so scared have they become that they in turn seek to scare off their ‘tormentors’ by adopting strange but ‘effective’ methods like nudity to protect their land.
However, that said, one of the ways of solving the land grabbing issue is to operationalize the digital land title recording system in the Ministry of Lands, a move that will expose those who have been tinkering with the system to the detriment of the true owners.
Let’s try it, it works.
