Dead right. Whoever buys this air land will live to regret it. Much sooner than they think
Nume.
Kasta..the son of Kaguta is selling Buganda land... let him and his tutsi friend sell buganda land to the lowest bidder..but then again, given the history of Buganda with land issue, I will not be surprise if some people matoka farms are not subjected to "pangas" as in Machette!!
MK
Uganda: The Land Give-Aways Are Legal
INTERVIEW
August 22, 2006
Posted to the web August 21, 2006
Dorothy Nakaweesi, Elias Biryabarema & Muhereza Kyamutetera
Uganda's desperate search for investors has seen a lot of government land parcelled out to investors at generous terms and
sometimes for free. Business Power asked Uganda Investment Authority Executive Director Dr Maggie Kigozi what the rationale is for the land giveaways. Excerpts.
Broadly, why has the government or UIA in this case continued against stiff opposition from the civil society, to dole out public land to the so-called investors?
First of all, let me say, UIA has the key role on behalf of the government of facilitating investors and one way of doing this is to provide them with land where they would place their investments.
Different businesses require different kinds of land. We have provided land from 1st to 8th street industrial area, in Nalukolongo, Kawempe, Ntinda, and Nakawa and these areas are now fully occupied and we are also looking at other areas like Jinja, Mbarara and a few other areas upcountry.
But there are also other investors
whose nature of business requires land in the city centre. A case in point is of the two hotels; one at Shimoni and the other at Nakasero, which will be catering for conferences and business tourists. Like for the sake of the Saudi investor, we are the ones who went to him and he told us he needed land in the city centre and we had to look around.
We went back to our database comprising both public and private land but we could not raise the 10 acres that we needed for Kingdom Holdings, who by the way are investing $65m or Shs120b. After this, we decided to go back to the government and actually, the investor met the president and this requirement was put on the table.
In the meantime, within government, various discussions had been going on about the various pieces of land owned by the government and the ministry of Education in particular had also identified Shimoni as being unsuitably placed.
Actually, the ministry had indicated willingness to move so long as the government would provide suitable alternative premises.
This presented us a breakthrough and this is how Shimoni went to investors.
Aya told us that they wanted to build a Hilton in Kampala, by its very definition; Hilton is a business hotel that must be in the business district.
They too, needed more than 10 acres, which we did not have in one piece and similarly we had to zero in on the Nakasero UBC [Uganda Broadcasting Council] land because in our mathematics we knew that we did not want to miss the $90 million investment and besides we knew we could always watch UBC and have the hotel at the same time.
What you should know is that we also have land for agriculture out of town provided to us by the government and almost all of this is already taken and at the moment,
we have no land for agriculture. But we have the private sector who have vast chunks of land that they are willing to lease out for commercial agriculture and we are willing to match the investors with these landowners.
For example, recently we had an offer with a one Jetrofa, which is going to produce bio-diesel in Bugiri on a huge 10 square mile belonging to a Ugandan and the investor is going to lease it from the owner.
Ugandans should also know that foreigners in Uganda never take land. This is to comfort Ugandans who think their land is gone; land is only leased to foreigners and our constitution stipulates so and our land law says the same.
The maximum foreigners can lease land is 99 years and we can always stop the lease the land goes back to the government or UIA or Ugandans who own it if we think the project is not going on well.
Besides we also sign
performance contracts with these investors, so they know what we expect of them and they must leave up to the performance expectations.
There is talk that some of these land giveaways, despite the good intentions are illegal and investors could lose them in future. How true is this?
That is not true. Everything we have done is within the law. We are working with the Uganda Land Commission which can stop any land allocation which they think is either illegal or unfair.
I think the major reason why this land issue has been blown out of scale is the media.
The very first day [an] investor arrives in the country, the press is already aware. Then stories begin to flow even about premature deals and the problem is that the public believes a lot in you [the media].
For example the way you are talking about Shimoni land is like it is a finished deal.
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