How the state in Uganda became a heavily armed squatter - Comment
First, find a friendly landlord.
Under the 1962 Uganda constitution, the state of Uganda applied to rent seven hills within Kampala city from the Kingdom of Buganda. Uganda's actual capital is Entebbe, where even the current government has lavishly renovated the State House.
This is why the city used to be called "the city of seven hills." In an arrangement seeking to reconcile the past with the present, the state of Uganda, in the form of its central government, was obliged to pay a nominal one Uganda shilling annually for this occupancy.
You would be surprised how many highly educated Ugandans — many of them landlords now — have immense difficulty in grasping this concept.
Second, "land-jack" the landlord.
This tenancy agreement was violently abrogated with the 1967 abolition of the Independence constitution, in which it was embedded. Many things changed with this.
The new "republic" took control of all lands and buildings previously belonging to the various federal units in the country: Tooro and now oil-rich Bunyoro in the west; Buganda, around the south and centre; mineral-rich Karamoja, which was once a special administrative unit; and Busoga on the River Nile, and declared them all to be "public land."
Third, after bouts of restitutive violence, renegotiate the terms of the tenancy. The law on "Traditional Leaders" passed in 1993 was supposed to be the new settlement of the underlying causes of the 1981-1986 civil war that brought President Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement to power.
However, since the realisation of the possibility of oil all along the western axis of the country, new claims have been animated among communities all the way from the South Sudan border to the Rwandan one.
There is much to suggest that this new reality is what has led to a sharpening of the exchanges between even previously placid traditional leaders and a central government determined to remain the only broker of Uganda's mineral rights.
This is what has leads to step number four: Default on the new agreement, and flatly refuse to leave. You are now a squatter.
"Unity" has become a key word in the vocabulary of the government of Uganda, as President Museveni's government strives to paradoxically dilute legitimate native demands by inventing new ones within their historical territories.
The legitimacy of the claims demonstrates the extent to which the state of Uganda is really a squatter on the properties over which it professes to govern, even among other significant social entities that the modern state project brought in.
Up to today, the original European Christian churches remain among the single largest landowners in the country. The Catholic Church in Uganda had to recently get the attention of the central government regarding the government's tenancy on a 60-acre piece of land on Nsambya hill upon which the Uganda Police Forces main barracks sits.
Located just south of the city centre, this hill is one of the largest hills among the seven, and also hosts the large new US embassy. It forms the core of the vast real estate holdings gifted to the Catholic Church by Buganda's King Kabaka Mwanga after the missionary White Fathers arrived in Buganda in 1878.
These holdings, in size and value, vastly exceed anything else the Church owns in the rest of the country.
Underneath the veneer of pan-Ugandan Catholicism, there is actually also an unspoken argument as to whether the Catholic Church in Uganda is really a Ugandan church or one founded in and for Buganda. This is partly why the two are able to often form common cause in the face of further attempted land grabs by the central government.
In this most recent case, reacting to rumours of a possible attempt at a land grab, the Church reminded the central government that it has been seriously delinquent in its rent obligations.
The Uganda Police Force now finds itself faced with a $74.5 million, 43-year rent arrears bill, as well as an eviction notice. But this is what makes the state of Uganda a squatter with a difference: the police are on its side, and so such an eviction is probably not enforceable.
The natives have good reason to be suspicious about central government's new-found love for the minorities it is so determined to "protect": Anyone can become one, and begin to manufacture claims.
In the mid-1950s, a petition was raised from among members of Uganda's then growing mixed African/European descent community.
They requested that the then colonial government grant them an extensive portion of the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria upon which they intended to establish their own exclusive "kingdom." They had even identified a prominent gentleman of mixed race descent who was to be their "Kabaka."
The lesson the natives have drawn is clear: nobody likes them, but everybody loves their land. As a result, they have increasingly adopted a mindset best described as "eternal vigilance," in the face of an armed squatter whose appetite for their land has been sharpened by the smell of oil.
Kalundi Serumanga is a social and political commentator based in Kampala
