"Government's proposed land law amendments are unjust"

President Museveni’s government wants to change the law to allow prospective investors in the mining industry to access private land that contains minerals without negotiating with the land-owners...His rationale for this was that “The people who have to give you consent are the people who own the minerals, and that is the government. The other man [landowner] has no consent to give because the property is not his”, said President Museveni...

Development induced land acquisition has been on the rise across the country and this can only get worse given the ambitious development targets that the government has set. The National Development Plan 2 (NDP II) whose aim is to attain lower middle income status by 2020, contains many infrastructural development projects such as roads, railways, airports, dams, refineries, oil pipelines etc. These are bound to increase pressure on land across the country hence increasing human displacement.

I believe that passing such a draconian amendment to the Constitution and other land laws will deprive Uganda’s Land Rights Movement of over two decades worth of achievement. The milestones in the legal regime governing land include the 1995 Constitution, four progressive amendments to the Land Act...and the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of UNRA Vs Asuman Irumba and another (2014), where the highest court in the land unequivocally pronounced itself on the need for free, prior and informed consent as well as compensation before compulsory acquisition of land by Government...I thus implore government not to flush 20 years of progress down the drain.