The leaders of the Bunyoro subregion are pleading with the Lands Ministry to step in right away and annul all land titles that were obtained in the area through fraud.
The leaders claim that a large number of land titles in the area were obtained improperly, placing the residents in danger of being forced off their ancestral lands.
The Buliisa County Member of Parliament, Stephen Birahwa Mukitale, says that thousands of residents in the Buliisa district are about to face forcible eviction from their land by those who obtained titles through fraud.He claims that, among other subcountries, Ngwedu, Biiso, and Butiaba are the most severely impacted.
The Bugahya County Member of Parliament for the Hoima district, Pius Wakabi, claims that numerous well-known land grabbers who are allegedly associated with the state have infiltrated his district and are taking land away from the inhabitants. In order to bring peace to the locals, he wants the Lands Ministry to look into the land titles and have them annulled.
The Hoima Woman MP, Harriet Businge, questions why Kampala residents are buying land in Bunyoro without the local leaders’ approval.
She warns that a large number of residents in the Bunyoro subregion may lose their land if the problem is not looked into and resolved right away.
According to Businge, the majority of land grabbers with strong ties to the government have gone so far as to label legitimate landowners in the area as rebels in an effort to win security assistance for their nefarious activities.
According to Buliisa’s LC5 Chairperson, Simon Agaba Kinene, wealthy individuals have taken advantage of the ignorance of the locals to seize land throughout the district and the surrounding area. He claims that even though many families in Buliisa are the rightful owners of the land, they are currently facing eviction threats.
The head of the Hoima district’s LC5, Kadir Kirungi, has requested that the lands ministry form a special committee to look into the rapidly expanding land titles in the Bunyoro subregion right away.
He claims that the government should give Bunyoro special consideration when it comes to land acquisition because the oil finding in the Bunyoro subregion is posing a danger to peoples’ rights to their property.
Many residents in the Kyabigambire sub county in the Hoima district, according to Charlis Wandera, are living in fear as a result of some dishonest people who just visited and surveyed their land without their permission.
The lands minister, Betty Kamya, recently told me that her ministry is shortly to develop a program to map, survey, demarcate, and title all of the land in the Bunyoro sub region. Betty Kamya was recently in the Bunyoro sub region.
Since 2014, there have been several violent and coercive evictions in the Bunyoro subregion, and the victims have never received any protection from the government.
Armed personnel in uniform have been carrying out the evictions. More than 500 households were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in Kigorobya sub county Hoima district’s Kyabisagazi 1 and Kyabisagazi 2 villages in February 2019.
When the armed men wearing uniforms resembling those of the Uganda Peoples Defense Forces and the Anti-riot police brutally evicted the residents, four toddlers lost their lives.
On February 13, 2019, under the pretense of looking for individuals engaged in subversive activities, armed troops stormed the village and drove the inhabitants from their ancestral property.
An eviction occurred instead of what had seemed to be a cordon and search operation.
Over 500 families and Edgar Agaba, a businessman in Hoima town, were engaged in a legal battle over the 485 acres of contested land.
The evicted people are landless and, according to reports, the majority have resorted to living with their relatives across the nation; they have never received assistance from the government to date.