Matia Lukwago, a resident of Kasanje village, says the community is living in fear due to threats of eviction to accommodate the oil palm project. He claims that shortly after the project was announced in 2021, some unscrupulous individuals, including those in positions of authority, rushed to process lease titles on the identified land, leading to threats of eviction against the long-time occupants.
Hundreds of residents from Nakigga, Kasanje, and Birinzi villages in Bukakata Sub-county, Masaka, have appealed to the government to include them in the oil palm growing project rather than evicting them from the land they have inhabited for decades.
In 2022, the government identified 15 square miles (10,000 acres) of land in Masaka District for the commercial growing of oil palm trees.
This is part of the broader effort to expand the National Oil Palm Project (NOPP), which began in Kalangala District in 2012.
However, some of the land earmarked for the project is currently occupied by hundreds of residents who have relied on it for their livelihoods. These occupants are now appealing to the government to integrate them into the project as smallholder oil palm growers rather than evicting them to make way for investors.
Matia Lukwago, a resident of Kasanje village, says the community is living in fear due to threats of eviction to accommodate the oil palm project. He claims that shortly after the project was announced in 2021, some unscrupulous individuals, including those in positions of authority, rushed to process lease titles on the identified land, leading to threats of eviction against the long-time occupants.
“For a long time, we knew this land was public land, which we have peacefully used for various activities such as agriculture, animal grazing, and settlement. But recently, we have seen people claiming ownership of the land and attempting to lease it to the government for oil palm cultivation,” Lukwago says.
Lukwago has called on the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, and Fisheries to investigate how the land, originally a public asset, was transferred to private individuals.
Gerald Kyeera, another affected resident from Nakigga, has also urged the government to protect the interests of the long-standing occupants by incorporating them into the project as out-growers rather than evicting them from land they have lived on for decades.
“We are now appealing to the government to provide us with the necessary inputs so we can also benefit from the project as out-growers,” Kyeera says.
He further expresses concern that some of the claimants to the land are unfamiliar to the community, suspecting they could be speculators looking to profit from the government project at the expense of the residents.
He explains that part of the land, covering 3 square miles, originally had a lease registered in the name of the pastoralists of Nakigga Ranch Farming Cooperative. However, the titles were transferred to freehold without the knowledge of the original subscribers, who are now facing eviction.
Kyeera is worried that because they were not allowed to apply for lease offers on the land, they may not be protected by the courts should the claimants sue them. His hope now rests on the possibility that the government will absorb them into the project.
//Cue in: “Kati ffe tugenda kulagawa…..
Cue out: …..nalino mulitunze.”//
While addressing the leadership of Kalangala Oil Palm Growers Trust (KOPGT) last week, the State Minister for Agriculture, Fred Bwino Kyakulaga, promised that the government would handle the expansion of the National Oil Palm Project (NOPP) carefully to avoid violating human rights.
However, these concerns come at a time when hundreds of residents who had settled in the former Sango Bay sugar estates in Kyotera District are in a legal battle with the government at Masaka High Court, opposing their eviction to make way for oil palm tree cultivation.
