By Mukwaba Katende
Every day people are thrown off their land, including women, children, and even men. Widows are thrown off their own land by their in-laws and left desperate, often with young children who will grow up not just in poverty but with no community to belong to.
Parliament has passed laws saying land grabbing shouldn’t happen, but no one bothers to enforce them.
The government wants to eradicate poverty, but thousands are forced into conditions worse than poverty.
And worst of all, the poor and vulnerable are forced off their land by guns that we can say locals fear to stand up against, and everyone turns away.
In many parts of the country, mostly in the villages, it affects the majority, and the impact on the victims can easily be imagined in an economy where farming is the only way that people can feed themselves.
But when land grabbing reaches this level, it is nolonger only about the victims themselves. All communities of Uganda have norms and values, with institutions from the family, the community, or the clan that regulate behaviour and protect the vulnerable.
Where these institutions are passive in the face of behaviour that is both criminal and a violation of the local culture, these institutions have shown themselves to be irrelevant and cannot survive. It is hard to know why the issue of land grabbing is so ignored.
We have government and NGOs who want to eradicate poverty, who fight HIV, and who work for the protection of children or the elderly. How can any of this be achieved when the basic necessity of all land to farm is being denied to so many natives?
Courts of law, LCs, and clan leaders hear cases, but when the land grabber ignores their rulings, they feel powerless and leave the victim to seek justice where they can find it.
Uganda has hundreds of TVs, radio stations, and newspapers in everyone’s language, but until a case ends in murder or involves a political scandal, you will never read or hear about the problem of land grabbing.
Almost no family is untouched, and yet land grabbing remains a problem that we do not deal with. It’s not that no one cares. It’s just that no one quite knows what to do.
The time for excuses has come to an end. The law is there for us to use. The customary law also forbids stealing land. We can mobilise the police and LCs and the customary leaders, family heads, and clan leaders to work together to bring an end to this shame.
I hope that the government, thousands of individuals, communities, and scores of organisations will see that this problem touches them and that their work cannot go ahead amidst this cancer problem that remains unaddressed.
Individual voices can go unheard, but if a cry goes out in every district, in every parish, and in every village, then the voice can be heard and the land grabbers can be stopped.
The scandal has only continued because people felt powerless as individuals and didn’t know how to stop it. Once we understand the tricks of the land grabbers, we can stop them. When we see both the cultural leaders and LCs failing to stop the land grabbers, we can work with them to uphold the law.
This call to get involved is for all individuals, communities, churches, NGOs, cultural leaders, clan leaders, LCs, the media, the police, local governments, and central governments. All have their part to play.
The author is the Head of Operations Media Concept Avenue, +256753263177, +256782377122
