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Land Bill and Museveni’s baffling arithmetic
Omar Kalinge-Nnyago
President Museveni is dead serious about the amendment to the land law. Already passed by cabinet, and awaiting tabling before the 8th Parliament, the proposed amendment is perhaps one of the most controversial pieces of legislation after the Domestic Relations Bill. Or as the amendment that abolished presidential term limits.
This emotive amendment is poised to test the MPs, especially from Buganda, to the limit. Then, as members of the 7th parliament; some of them were among those who booked themselves a place in what has widely become known as the “Hall of Shame”- those men and women who accepted Shs5 million, slightly over three thousand dollars, in exchange for their conscience.
One’s conscience is an invaluable commodity, others would rather die in the protection of it, than live with shame.
This should mean that life without a conscience is not worth living. If conscience has the higher value, then life has the lesser. Insurance companies can then quickly make a simple calculation.
If those men and women could sell their conscience for three thousand dollars, their life surely would cost so much lower. Their life insurance compensation would then not exceed a few hundred dollars.
Museveni has had a passionate argument. He is ruffled that 420,000 land title holders should hold Uganda’s 30 million at ransom. Suddenly, he has become very just. Very equitable. Very understanding. I suspect something spiritual has happened to him, especially that Kampala has become a City of God.
For, I recall, it was he who made the calculation to conclude that British American Tobacco was more important than some districts – the ones he likes to create every other week.
Back to the 420,000 land lords. The president asks: “How can we let 420,000 people chase away the 30 million? Now it seems, from the president’s argument, that all children in Uganda and their parents with collective interest on land do not exist, but as individuals.
And there is this crisis of fathers evicting their children, and wives evicting their husbands. And that the 30 million all live on bibanja. It also means that Uganda’s population is 30,420,000 persons. It also means that the 420,000 landlords own as much land in Karamoja, Ankole, Teso, Gulu, Kitgum and perhaps Pader, as they do in Buganda.
There is no doubt that the amendment targets Buganda landlords however revolutionary the president may wish to suddenly sound. I also recall that the nastier cases of evictions of bibanja owners have happened in Buganda.
Especially by people with connections to the regime, who, as luck would have it, are actually not from Buganda. The kind that has the amount of money to buy miles of Buganda land like my “free speech hero,” Brig. Henry Tumukunde, did in Bugerere.
I should not share the view of a few Ugandan bloggers who have decided that the proposed land law amendment ‘s other name is the “Balaalo Protection Act.” I also do not worry like most in Buganda that after his very outstanding performance as Minister of State for Micro Finance, also dubbed Bonna Bagaggawale, Gen. Salim Saleh, my money making guru might be appointed to head the Ministry of Lands, being a very challenging ministry.
I know that the Balaalo, this very important section of our population, have been the more prominent victims of the evictions, especially recently, thus triggering the president’s sense of justice we had not seen in him for a long time. Buganda’s reaction to the proposed amendment has been swift and predictable.
It has embarked on a Buganda –wide civil education campaign- perhaps- in anticipation of a referendum that President Museveni has threatened to hold, if necessary. The government has also dispatched teams to Buganda, to “expose the lies” from Mengo.
From the absurd arithmetic of the president, his threat of a referendum, perhaps after there is some money left after he has bought a new presidential jet, to the angry phone calls on the FM radios, I see a few demonstrations in the near future, lots of tear gas, brisk business at Buganda Road Court and of course, full capacity at the government prison.
Yet, apart from the Baganda, there are scores of non-Baganda landlords in Buganda who are resisting the proposed amendment. Like the Domestic Relations Bill which has stalled in two parliaments, thanks to a lethal alliance of polygamous Christians and Muslims conveniently fronting Muslims, we might see non-Baganda landlords in alliance with Mengo, conveniently fronting Buganda activists. There must always be someone plausible to blame.
This is a controversy that has come at the wrong time. Fortunately, it has come at the end of the year when nothing much can be done anyway. But not before that land arguments have gotten their way into the Christmas sermons in much of Buganda.
Being the prayerful nation we are and the chance of two major devotions this December, Eid-ul-Adha and Christmas, I know most people are praying that this amendment dies as peacefully as the Domestic Relations Bill did. Both are suspicious legislation, neither good intentioned nor well thought out.
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