Wrong questions always lead to wrong answers
IF you insist on asking the wrong questions about your problems, you will never get the right answers to them. Mr Peter Mulira’s recent attempt to shape the current debate over land policy is a good example of this dilemma. Having missed the essential point in his article, “Uganda needs a new l
By Kalundi Serumaga
IF you insist on asking the wrong questions about your problems, you will never get the right answers to them. Mr Peter Mulira’s recent attempt to shape the current debate over land policy is a good example of this dilemma. Having missed the essential point in his article, “Uganda needs a new land law to correct anomalies†published on November 15, he gets bogged down in legalistic technicalities.
Those pushing for the current proposals to amend the Land Act have invented the question, “what is to be done about land ownership in Buganda?†and want to hoodwink Ugandans into using it as the starting point for solving land problems. This is very misleading.
Like the NRM ideologues, Mulira tries to create the impression that Buganda is a problem that “Uganda†is obliged to, and capable of solving. In fact, it is the other way round: Uganda is the problem that all the natives here need to sort out. Mulira’s thinking places the whole discussion on the wrong footing from the outset, and will result in further misery for all concerned.
Land in Buganda (and elsewhere) already has an owner: the entire people of Buganda. Furthermore, it already has a system of ownership: the Butaka system headed by the Ssabataka.
The 1900 Agreement and all its constitutional descendants have simply been frustrating this. The real question therefore is, how can the natives’ land rights be safeguarded while accommodating modern land use needs for large-scale mechanised plantation farming, wildlife conservation, urbanisation; mining and factories?
To ask any other question is to be “obscurantist†(to borrow a favourite NRM word). Recent reports that the Basongora may be allowed to return to Kasese, if true, will be a good example of the recognition of natives’ rights to the radical title to their land.
What is needed now is a uniform application of this thinking to all parts of the country, as opposed to a piecemeal one favouring some westerners only.
Nobody is scared of just and rational land reform, but contrary to what Mulira and his NRM soulmates think; reform does not necessarily mean dispossession. The best example to give them is the modern industrial nation called Britain (since Mulira referred to it), where in fact, much of the capital city of London sits on privately owned land. In the borough (equal to a KCC Central Division here) of Westminster, (where the UK parliament, and many government offices are found), one Gerald Grosvenor owns about 300 acres of the most expensive parts.
The Grosvenor family are descendants of some of the warriors commanded by William the Conqueror, who crossed to southern England from a place called Normandy (now part of France), and defeated the local king Harold in battle in 1066. They established estates and the new royal dynasty that eventually controlled all of England, and whose current head also heads the Commonwealth. Many of them still have names that are derived from French (Grosvenor is Gros Veneur, meaning “Big Hunterâ€, as his ancestor was in charge of William’s hunting expeditions) a language that was used by the English nobility (many of their family mottos are still in French) for a long time afterwards.
Grosvenor also owns over150,000 acres in other parts of England and Scotland, and collects a rent annually from the borough of Westminster, but has no say in the management of the city. The same applies to other such land-owning families whose estates were swallowed up as London expanded.
Another example is the rights of the indigenous Maori people, who now only make up 15% of New Zealand’s population having lost 96% of their land between 1840 and 1890 to white British settlers through forced purchases, confiscations and 1900 Agreement-type treaties.
When the Court of Appeal there recently ruled that the Maori retained the customary title to all the coastal areas (land and sea) of New Zealand, the government defied it by passing an Act in 2004 negating that ruling, a move that has been condemned by the United Nations. Now you know why the NRM wants to keep land issues out of our court system. We do not have to copy the details of these arrangements, but the principles behind them are clear: First, life does not begin with the modern law that Mulira is obsessed with; ownership is ownership, even before the modern world was invented. Second, new use-needs do not automatically mean that the original owners have to lose out, regardless of whether that ownership is individual or communal.
The proposed amendments are therefore really simply an attempt to continue with the illegitimate Ugandan political culture of grabbing through “liberationâ€.
The British overthrew Kabalega, Mwanga and the Bataka under the excuse of “saving†us from barbarism and the slave trade. In the process, Buganda lost over half her land, and much of Bunyoro became a “National Parkâ€.
Obote I was liberating Toro, Ankole, Bunyoro and Buganda from “feudalism†when in 1967 they re-grabbed what the departing British had only recently returned to its owners. Amin was “liberating†squatters when he authorised horizontal land-grabbing through his 1975 decree, and now the NRM is “liberating†Buganda’s land from its owners.
In essence, what we are witnessing through the proposed amendments is a continued attempt by illegitimate land holders (which includes “The Republic of Ugandaâ€) to see how to hold on to stolen land and create the best conditions for filching even more, while locking the real, legitimate owners out of the discussion.
Such schemes can only work if the illegitimate holders succeed in their current campaign of increasingly poisoning the relations between communities.
The correct way forward is very clear: the government and its ideologues should stop pretending that they “cannot seeâ€, as Mulira is pleading, the political entity called Buganda and other native governments and communities.
Government has the power to improve its eyesight simply through federating the country, thus granting them legal recognition. Only then can the “Republic of Uganda†safely move from being the divisive, violent squatter of today, and become a respectable tenant on native land.
If “the Republic†continues trying to avoid this, the native will either evict it, or remove themselves from its control. “Stand warnedâ€, as lawyers say.
kalundi@yahoo.com
IF you insist on asking the wrong questions about your problems, you will never get the right answers to them. Mr Peter Mulira’s recent attempt to shape the current debate over land policy is a good example of this dilemma. Having missed the essential point in his article, “Uganda needs a new land law to correct anomalies†published on November 15, he gets bogged down in legalistic technicalities.
Those pushing for the current proposals to amend the Land Act have invented the question, “what is to be done about land ownership in Buganda?†and want to hoodwink Ugandans into using it as the starting point for solving land problems. This is very misleading.
Like the NRM ideologues, Mulira tries to create the impression that Buganda is a problem that “Uganda†is obliged to, and capable of solving. In fact, it is the other way round: Uganda is the problem that all the natives here need to sort out. Mulira’s thinking places the whole discussion on the wrong footing from the outset, and will result in further misery for all concerned.
Land in Buganda (and elsewhere) already has an owner: the entire people of Buganda. Furthermore, it already has a system of ownership: the Butaka system headed by the Ssabataka.
The 1900 Agreement and all its constitutional descendants have simply been frustrating this. The real question therefore is, how can the natives’ land rights be safeguarded while accommodating modern land use needs for large-scale mechanised plantation farming, wildlife conservation, urbanisation; mining and factories?
To ask any other question is to be “obscurantist†(to borrow a favourite NRM word). Recent reports that the Basongora may be allowed to return to Kasese, if true, will be a good example of the recognition of natives’ rights to the radical title to their land.
What is needed now is a uniform application of this thinking to all parts of the country, as opposed to a piecemeal one favouring some westerners only.
Nobody is scared of just and rational land reform, but contrary to what Mulira and his NRM soulmates think; reform does not necessarily mean dispossession. The best example to give them is the modern industrial nation called Britain (since Mulira referred to it), where in fact, much of the capital city of London sits on privately owned land. In the borough (equal to a KCC Central Division here) of Westminster, (where the UK parliament, and many government offices are found), one Gerald Grosvenor owns about 300 acres of the most expensive parts.
The Grosvenor family are descendants of some of the warriors commanded by William the Conqueror, who crossed to southern England from a place called Normandy (now part of France), and defeated the local king Harold in battle in 1066. They established estates and the new royal dynasty that eventually controlled all of England, and whose current head also heads the Commonwealth. Many of them still have names that are derived from French (Grosvenor is Gros Veneur, meaning “Big Hunterâ€, as his ancestor was in charge of William’s hunting expeditions) a language that was used by the English nobility (many of their family mottos are still in French) for a long time afterwards.
Grosvenor also owns over150,000 acres in other parts of England and Scotland, and collects a rent annually from the borough of Westminster, but has no say in the management of the city. The same applies to other such land-owning families whose estates were swallowed up as London expanded.
Another example is the rights of the indigenous Maori people, who now only make up 15% of New Zealand’s population having lost 96% of their land between 1840 and 1890 to white British settlers through forced purchases, confiscations and 1900 Agreement-type treaties.
When the Court of Appeal there recently ruled that the Maori retained the customary title to all the coastal areas (land and sea) of New Zealand, the government defied it by passing an Act in 2004 negating that ruling, a move that has been condemned by the United Nations. Now you know why the NRM wants to keep land issues out of our court system. We do not have to copy the details of these arrangements, but the principles behind them are clear: First, life does not begin with the modern law that Mulira is obsessed with; ownership is ownership, even before the modern world was invented. Second, new use-needs do not automatically mean that the original owners have to lose out, regardless of whether that ownership is individual or communal.
The proposed amendments are therefore really simply an attempt to continue with the illegitimate Ugandan political culture of grabbing through “liberationâ€.
The British overthrew Kabalega, Mwanga and the Bataka under the excuse of “saving†us from barbarism and the slave trade. In the process, Buganda lost over half her land, and much of Bunyoro became a “National Parkâ€.
Obote I was liberating Toro, Ankole, Bunyoro and Buganda from “feudalism†when in 1967 they re-grabbed what the departing British had only recently returned to its owners. Amin was “liberating†squatters when he authorised horizontal land-grabbing through his 1975 decree, and now the NRM is “liberating†Buganda’s land from its owners.
In essence, what we are witnessing through the proposed amendments is a continued attempt by illegitimate land holders (which includes “The Republic of Ugandaâ€) to see how to hold on to stolen land and create the best conditions for filching even more, while locking the real, legitimate owners out of the discussion.
Such schemes can only work if the illegitimate holders succeed in their current campaign of increasingly poisoning the relations between communities.
The correct way forward is very clear: the government and its ideologues should stop pretending that they “cannot seeâ€, as Mulira is pleading, the political entity called Buganda and other native governments and communities.
Government has the power to improve its eyesight simply through federating the country, thus granting them legal recognition. Only then can the “Republic of Uganda†safely move from being the divisive, violent squatter of today, and become a respectable tenant on native land.
If “the Republic†continues trying to avoid this, the native will either evict it, or remove themselves from its control. “Stand warnedâ€, as lawyers say.
kalundi@yahoo.com