Uganda widens fake land-title crackdown as public land inventory reaches Mbale
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Uganda's state minister for lands, Harriet Ntabazi, warned officials in eastern Uganda against grabbing public land as the government's national land inventory rollout reached Mbale.
Uganda's state minister for lands, Harriet Ntabazi, has brought the government's campaign against fraudulent land titling to eastern Uganda, warning officials in the Bugisu, Teso and Bukedi sub-regions to stop grabbing or encroaching on public land or face action.
Ntabazi was speaking at a regional stakeholders' workshop on the development of a comprehensive government land inventory at Mbale Resort Hotel, the latest leg of a national rollout in which the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development and the Uganda Land Commission are identifying, surveying and digitally registering every parcel of state-owned land.
"Some government officials have made it a habit to grab or encroach on government land in areas where they work, including schools, hospitals and government headquarters," she said, telling government workers to acquire land through legitimate means instead.
The Mbale engagement follows a series of regional workshops at which ministry leaders have grown increasingly blunt about officials accused of converting public land into private hands. At the Kigezi workshop in Kabale, Ntabazi accused staff in the ministry's zonal offices of knowingly issuing fresh titles over land already registered to rightful owners, in some cases producing several competing titles for a single plot. Senior lands minister Judith Nabakooba directed security agencies at a Masaka workshop in August to investigate and arrest officials accused of fraudulently titling and selling government land.
In August the ministry suspended the routine issuance of special certificates of title for three months, citing double titling and forged declarations, a move that has drawn objections from the Uganda Law Society over its legal basis. Officials describe the inventory, launched in July, as Uganda's first centralised, continuously updated register of public land. The five-year exercise is intended to document every identifiable state plot, including schools, hospitals, police stations, road reserves, wetlands and forests, and feed the records into the National Land Information System. Public land accounts for about 23% of Uganda's land area, but only about a quarter of it has been formally titled.