By Joachim Buwembo

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Over the past couple of weeks, Uganda’s Financial Intelligence Authority has been blocking the bank accounts of a few civil society organisations, suspected of financing terrorism. I suppose we should be feeling very happy with FIA for saving us the fear of some terrorist blowing up the building we are in.

It is also in order to point FIA to another even more deadly explosion in the making that can mess up all our lives and country, so that they investigate it with the same vigour as they investigated the NGOs whose accounts they blocked.
A team comprising some of the country’s best economists has just concluded a research for Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC) conducted between December 2019 to September 2020 and released a worrying report.

It transpires, according to the report, that 14 percent of Uganda’s entire land mass is owned by a few people. Without saying exactly how few these relatively few people are, the Ugandan researchers defined a large land holding as one measuring 200 hectares or more. That is about a square mile or more.

Being economists and not security people, they proceed to make recommendations, key of which was capping the landholding in the country to stop the impending dispossession of the majority masses of their right to their source of livelihood — their birth right at that.

If the millions of unemployed youth cannot get jobs and can no longer access land to grow food, it does not take a professor of conflict studies to predict an explosion. In fact this same week when the report was released, a group of rival parliamentary candidates from different parties in northern Uganda resolved to work together to protect the rights of their Acholi people to land, held under what in Uganda is called customary land tenure.

They made interesting statements like people from Kampala looking at communal land and insensitively describing it as empty land which they proceed to “buy” and process title deeds for it.
A few questions that should motivate FIA to gain interest in the land issue include why on earth someone should buy square miles of land which they do not intend to use.

What is the source of the money some people are using to fence off land and fence out the people who need it for food? Why are people burying money in acquisition of huge tracts of land instead of investing it in active economic pursuits, including acquiring government stock which is even safer than land? Who indeed wants to lock people off the land and create a country of fifty billionaires and fifty million beggars in the next five to fifteen years? Can the 50 billionaires command enough weapons and weapon firing robots to hold the 50 million beggars at bay forever without creating enough jobs for them?

Who stands to benefit if a bloody uprising engulfed the country? When our intelligence services build and analyse possible scenarios and brainstorm how to prevent ensuing explosions, does FIA get to access their observations? Does FIA think terrorists only plant bombs in buildings and buses or do they know that more dangerous ones foment bloody social upheavals? Did FIA read the HURIPEC report and if so, did they read that some of those holding the land tracts are security officers (who seek to use anything –including land holdings- in warfare)?

Only this same week, we say the Uganda National Roads Authority making a scary revelation that the country is paying $81,000 daily in fines for contracts signed but the contractors cannot access the work sites.

In plain English, the land where the project is supposed to be executed is still being held by a speculator who acquired it and demanded an impossible compensation sum. Eighty one thousand dollars every day that a speculator refuses to vacate land he secured on learning that a vital section of infrastructure was to be located there.

Those are fines to the contractors, before counting the interest accumulating on the loan. And the loan itself. And the hefty compensation price.
Can even the most wildly optimistic dreamer expect the country to escape the debt trap in such circumstances? And is the mighty FIA so innocent and naïve not to suspect any subversive intent in such transactions?
As a man grows older and older, he believes more and more in God. Maybe our security is so efficient and strong. But verily, God is also playing a big part in keeping the country safe in case FIA only sees terrorism sponsors in NGOs and doesn’t focus on those who cripple the government financially while subtly planting mass social economic discontent.

Joachim Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail:[email protected]