Mukono, Uganda — Uganda has begun building its first comprehensive national register of government land, an undertaking officials say is aimed squarely at land grabbers who for years have carved up public property the state often cannot prove it owns.

The five-year exercise, the Comprehensive Government Land Inventory, will document every identifiable state plot — schools, hospitals, police stations, road reserves, wetlands and forests among them — and record who owns each, how it is used and whether it is under threat.

“If we don’t do that, then we may never have land to protect,” Lands Minister Judith Nabakooba told a regional workshop at Rider Hotel in Mukono, east of the capital Kampala, on Thursday.

The vulnerability is considerable. Government land makes up about 23 percent of Uganda’s territory, but only roughly a quarter of it has been formally titled, according to the Uganda Land Commission — leaving the majority undocumented and, officials concede, easy to grab.

Nabakooba said Uganda’s rapid transformation was making the problem worse. Towns are spreading, infrastructure and industry are expanding, and land that was rural only a few years ago is now valuable real estate. She warned that population growth — which she said could push Uganda towards 70 million people by 2050 — would only sharpen the competition for a fixed supply of land.

The minister urged local authorities to enforce physical development plans and to build upwards rather than outwards. “Can we now begin thinking of going vertical when you are building offices and spaces for accommodation… then the rest of the land is used for agricultural purposes?” she asked. She singled out Wakiso district, on Kampala’s fringes, where development pressure is most intense, and cautioned officials against surrendering government plots simply because they appeared vacant.

Local knowledge, national record

The Mukono meeting, billed as the “Buganda 1” engagement and the second after the programme’s national launch in July, gathered district chairpersons, resident district commissioners, land board members and civil society from central-region districts including Wakiso, Mukono, Buikwe, Kayunga, Luweero, Nakasongola and Buvuma.

Uganda Land Commission chairperson Prof Pen Mogi Nyeko told them their local knowledge was central to the exercise. “You all virtually know what land belongs to government,” he said, appealing to them to help identify and title state plots — and warning land boards not to hand public land to individuals.

He said the state was the country’s biggest developer, and that consolidated, protected land could anchor major projects. Nyeko pointed to the Amuru sugar scheme in northern Uganda, where the government compensated landowners across some 10,000 hectares for a plantation and factory, as an example of what public land could enable, describing the local opposition it once faced as “negative politics”. The project in fact has a long and contested history, resisted for years by Acholi communities and their leaders and fought through the courts over customary ownership before compensation was settled.

Nyeko also raised the grabbing of institutional land, including plots belonging to church-founded schools. “Many of you were students in these lands, in these schools. So it is you to help us get those lands protected,” he said. He stressed the commission was not after private property: “The constitution is very clear: land belongs to the people. For us, we are only interested in land which belongs to government.” A reliable inventory, he added, would let the state direct investors to suitable sites — “if we know that there is 2, 3 square miles of land belonging to government in Nakasongola… we recommend that area for industrialisation.”

A reform on a tight budget

For all its ambition, the programme is starting with little money. The commission has said it was costed at about 100 billion shillings (roughly $27m), but only 6 billion shillings was released this financial year, even after a parliamentary committee recommended more. Implementation will be phased, beginning with cities and municipalities where land values — and the incentive to grab — are highest.

Emmanuel Kaganzi, representing the ministry’s permanent secretary, said the register had to capture more than ownership. It should show whether each parcel was surveyed, titled and free of encroachment or competing claims, he said, giving government the chance “to intervene early” rather than react to disputes after the fact.

But a register was only as good as its upkeep, he cautioned. “A government land inventory completed today but not updated tomorrow will gradually lose its usefulness.” He said responsibility for keeping records current would fall across the commission, the ministry, local governments and the agencies that occupy state land, and pressed repeatedly for coordination between them. The inventory, he added, should build on systems already in place — the Uganda Land Information System, the National Land Information Centre and the ministry’s zonal offices, which have moved land services closer to citizens — rather than create new silos.

Kaganzi was blunt about the human element. “An accurate system will achieve little if public officers knowingly allow government land to be encroached, to be taken, to be grabbed, and irregularly allocated,” he said, adding that officials entrusted with public land must treat it as belonging to the people of Uganda.

Cross-checking a fragmented record

The commission’s secretary, Andrew Nyumba, said the state’s own records were part of the problem, scattered across the commission, ministries, local governments and district land boards and never fully reconciled. The existing records, he said, did not amount to a comprehensive picture of government land.

For each holding, he said, the inventory should answer a set of basic questions — what the parcel is, where it lies, its size and boundaries, the evidence of state ownership, which institution is responsible, how it is used, whether it is documented and whether it is occupied, encroached upon or disputed. The commission would draw on registry and cadastral data, ministry and local-government records, survey and planning information, asset registers, historical archives, community knowledge and, where needed, physical checks on the ground.

Those sources would be cross-checked against one another, and disagreements, Nyumba argued, were useful rather than a setback. “A discrepancy in information is not necessarily a failure of the exercise. It is also information,” he said, describing conflicting records as a signal of where further verification was required. The goal, he said, was to move “from fragmented information toward a more reliable, integrated and continuously maintained picture of government land in Uganda”.

The drive follows years of criticism over the commission’s record-keeping. The Auditor General has previously flagged the absence of a comprehensive government land database, and the body has been drawn into numerous court cases over contested public plots — the very gaps the inventory is meant to close.

Source: www.ugstandard.com/