It is not practical to tax idle land in Uganda’s circumstances

Dec 26, 2009

The draft land use policy is finally out. Last Wednesday, The New Vision carried a story that under the said draft policy, it is proposed that idle land will be taxed.

By Moses Byaruhanga
The draft land use policy is finally out. Last Wednesday, The New Vision carried a story that under the said draft policy, it is proposed that idle land will be taxed.

I don’t agree with that position of taxing what is called idle land. This is an elitist position and the NRM being a mass organisation cannot take such a position. If all the land in Uganda was owned by the middle class, then one would talk of taxing land not only for failure to utilize it but also for property tax. However, with the majority of Ugandans being peasants, taxing unused land will be a disaster.

First we are in a process of transforming our peasantry from subsistence production to producing for the market. If people are still using their land for subsistence production, taxing the unutilised land cannot be a solution to urge them make use of the land.

Secondly, before one can talk of taxing idle land, are there means of utilising it in case one wanted to do so? When the president visited Rukungiri district in September last year, he was told that there was no tractor for hire in the whole district. The same applies to many districts in Uganda today.

Personally I looked for a tractor for hire in Kayunga a few months a go and failed to get it in good time to beat the planting season. The tractor aside, depending on the size of land one has, opening of land using a bull dozer is the way to go for those with large trucks of land.

Again the same problem of lack of enough equipment for hire comes up. If you happen to get them the cost is about sh300,000 per acre for bush clearing. The banks here have been avoiding agriculture because of the risks involved. So where does one get the money to develop the land in order to avoid paying a tax for idle land just because one couldn’t utilize all the land they own? With poor agricultural credit it is not easy to engage in commercial agriculture for those with large pieces of land more so when they want to engage in crop farming.

One can argue that if one cannot utilize the land they own, then let them sell it. In practice selling land is not the solution because the one buying it will face the same problems mentioned above that is if you get buyers. I always see adverts of land in the papers and more often you see the same piece of land being re-advertised several times.

Today the market issues are being sorted out as a result of the regional market. It was common in the past for farmers to fail to sell their produce at a price where they would break even. The regional market notwithstanding, we need processing of the products we produce. Because of perishability of agricultural produce, if all arable land in Uganda was utilized for production, without processing, farmers would have problems of the market. If there is no processing you cannot blame it on the farmers; and neither can you rely on the private sector to always come in time and invest in processing because of the market forces. If that were so, we would be having many coffee processing plants in this country, Uganda being one of the largest producers of coffee in the world. Therefore, there is a need for government to come in and kick start some processing industries like it is being planned for a fruit processing plant in Soroti whose funds are already in the budget.

From the above, it is clear that taxing idle land is not workable in Uganda today. I don’t need to dwell so much on the land tenure system in the country. With only about 20% of land in Uganda titled according to the ministry of lands, how even do you start determining which land is idle? How would you deal with customary land? And who would pay a tax for the idle customary land?

The proponents of a land tax are simply out of touch with reality. Am one of those who want most of the arable land in Uganda put to use as doing so has a lot of economic benefits to the individual owners of the land and the country at large.

However, we have to sort out issues of mechanization of agriculture, irrigation, processing, market and agricultural financing. To propose a land tax now is to create hatred (okukyayisa) to NRM among Ugandans. Such an elitist proposal should be discarded. We have also to be cautious in towns.

The districts have been creating town councils where a big part of the town council is rural. There is no planning for the said town councils and the population continues to grow food crops in towns nad municipalities. To stop them because they are towns would be difficult to implement. We have to go slow.

The writer is special presidential assistant on political affairs

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