Recently, while presiding over the commissioning of teachers’ houses, classrooms and pit-latrines at Lwanda Primary School in Jinja, the lands minister Daudi Migereko advised the management committees of various public schools to acquire titles for their land.
Among the schools singled out in Jinja is the Main Street Primary School and Spire Road Primary School. Now, both these public schools and several others not mentioned have a historical bearing on the greater Busoga region and the country at large, having provided an education to many young people who have since gone on to become useful citizens and so, the usefulness of such schools cannot be emphasized.
Indeed, and with all due respect, Uganda as a country can ill-afford a situation where the economic interests of a few nibbling individuals override the benefits that accrue from the sustained provision of education for the masses.
Against such a background therefore, much as the advice by Mr Migereko might be considered long overdue, it is still worth following with gusto if the country is to redeem its fledgling education system.
For starters, since Mr Migereko is the line minister concerned with land management and administration in the country, he can team up with his education ministry counterpart and both come up with a water-tight strategy to deter any would-be grabbing of public school land by tabling the stinging matter before Cabinet for adoption, before it can be put to the floor of Parliament for debate and eventual enacting into law.
Once that is done, public officials including members of the school management committees will shed off the unenviable task of persistently trying to fight off the land grabbers, most of who are wayward ‘tycoons’ who want to build shopping malls and bonded warehouses.
