Africa-Press – Uganda. The Masaka Resident City Commissioner, Mr Hudu Hussein has ordered a boundary opening on a piece of land where the city authorities plan to erect their new headquarters.
This follows reports that unknown private developers already acquired title deeds on the public land.
Mr Hudu said to avoid losing the prime city land to private developers, the city authorities have to swiftly conduct boundary opening of the land to ascertain the remaining size of the piece of land.
“This is an eye-opener, and we have to ascertain the actual size of the land. We may plan for 2.8 acres when someone has already grabbed 20 or even 50 decimals, that is how they steal land, we need to be very sure so that we confirm the actual size available and this should be taken seriously.” He said during an interview on Wednesday
Mr Arnold Ddamulira, an official from UBUNTU Consults Ltd, a firm hired by the city council to design the structural designs of the city headquarters, said the search they made at the Ministry of Lands Registry shows that Plot 2-10 which is owned by the city council and earmarked for construction of city council hall was subdivided into two plots- Plot 5 and Plot 16 which has made the remaining piece of land a bit smaller for the project.
“We made a survey on the land, and we found out that Plot 2-10 is divided into three plots, with separate titles, and we could not proceed with such a discrepancy, so, we decided to halt the work until we get advice from the council on how we can proceed,” he added.
Due to discrepancy, Kimaanya/Kabonera Municipality legislator, Dr Abed Bwanika has asked the city council authorities to embark on establishing the owners of the plots of land created city council land on top of working on closing gaps in the city land boards which has left several prime public spaces in the city fraudulently allocated to the private developers.
“The status of the land shows that it is partitioned and this is different from what the city title shows, they may have left us with a small portion of the land, and we can’t just put our project there without sufficient knowledge about the status of that land. We need to do another search and establish who are the owners of those plots,” he said
Masaka deputy City clerk, Mr Richard Mugisha, said they are going to investigate the matter and know the developers who were allocated public land, adding that they may be forced to halt the process of making designs for the city hall if they discover that the size of the land needed for the project is not enough.
In Masaka’s central business area, a 100ft by 50ft plot of land which was bought at Shs100m five years ago currently goes for between Shs500m and 800m.
In other city suburbs, land prices are picking up at a high speed and the prices are expected to further go up in the coming few months.
Masaka City Planner Mr Martin Kigozi however, said that he has information that some of the leases that were secured on the public piece of land allocated for the new city hall project expired.
“Our land is intact and there is no cause for alarm,” he said.
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