(English) April 30, 2012
A woman looks on with her two babies in hand after her house was razed down during the KCCA evictions in Port Bell, Luzira early this year. Photo: Ismail Kezaala.
It is now three months since the murderous eviction that went wrong at Port Bell in Luzira, a Kampala suburb.
The ground has, however, been set for a similarly hot-tempered eviction exercise of occupants on land belonging to Uganda Railways Corporation (URC), 100 metres away from the spot where Santos Komakech, a KCCA bodyguard, allegedly shot three tenants.
According to an eviction notice seen by this newspaper, URC accuses the tenants of encroaching on and trespassing on the land, and then ignoring its demands to vacate it.
The corporation thus gave the occupants a 14-day notice before it forcibly evicts them. That grace period ends today, April 30. But the occupants are not going without a fight. They say they will not leave the land until they are fully compensated and given time to search for an alternative place to relocate.
The occupants say they have stayed on the land for more than 20 years now, without anybody either laying claim to the land or fencing it off or issuing them with an eviction notice, until now.
In that time, they have made developments on the land, on which stands mainly mud and wattle houses, plus a few semi-permanent brick and mortar houses. “At a time like this, I have nowhere to go. Every penny I have made, I spent it here. Where do you want me to go? We want them to pay us before we leave. If they think they will kill us like lice, they are mistaken. They will kill a few, but they will not go back with the numbers they came with,” says Jolly Wamala, who has stayed on the land since 1993.
Using the 2010 Land Amendment Act as defence, the occupants say they are bonafide settlers on the land who have made developments on it so the land owners should duly compensate them before eviction.
They petitioned Nakawa Division’s deputy Resident District Commissioner Monday Kintu, who in two separate letters suspended the eviction exercise. But URC seems to have ignored the RDC and continued with plans to evict the residents.
Efforts to get a comment from Uganda Railways Corporation were futile as the phone contacts indicated on the eviction notice either went unanswered or were not available.
The occupants agree that they do not own the land. It is impossible to pin point the first settler on the land, but most settlers were invited to settle by family members.
Most were either vendors in a nearby market that has since been shifted, while others are army veterans who say they came to Port Bell to work for a company that removed water hyacinth from Lake Victoria.
Source: Daily Monitor
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