Bulldozers before compensation: Masanda families count the cost of Uganda's railway clearance
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Uganda Railways Corporation has demolished homes, shops and gardens on a 60-metre reserve at Masanda in Kyengera, leaving families who say they were promised compensation four years ago without shelter or income.
Demolitions began in Masanda Village, Kyengera Town Council, on October 19 when Uganda Railways Corporation (URC), backed by anti-riot police, deployed bulldozers and excavators to clear homes, businesses and gardens on a 60-metre-wide railway reserve. The operation followed a Cabinet directive and a nationwide removal exercise launched on October 12, and is intended to clear the corridor for rehabilitation of the metre-gauge railway and the planned Standard Gauge Railway western route from Kampala to Kasese.
URC spokesperson John Lenonn Ssengendo said residents had been warned for four years to vacate and would not be compensated because they had settled on railway land. Residents tell a different story: they say they received eviction notices in 2022 alongside promises of compensation, waited for payment that never came, and then watched the bulldozers arrive. As demolitions entered a second day on October 20, displaced families salvaged mattresses, furniture and merchandise along the roadside while MPs demanded the exercise be suspended until URC resolves conflicting accounts of the reserve's boundaries.
For Saidat Babirye, the loss extends beyond a house. Over six years in Masanda she built eight rental units that supported her four school-going children. "I do not know where to go or where to put my belongings. I am a single mother, and I do not have parents," she said, adding that her eldest son fainted after seeing the houses being dismantled.
Ephraim Kimbugwe sold cosmetics from a shop in Masanda for four years. "I do not know how I will recover the money I have invested or where I will get the money to start again," he said. Margret Kisakye, 65, said she had lived in the village long enough that the place and the word home had become the same thing. "At my age, starting again is not easy," she said.
The families now face the same questions of shelter, income and what to do with the few possessions they saved, with no compensation timetable announced and the railway corridor clearance continuing elsewhere on the network.