President should be proud of contents of Constitution

President Museveni’s bid to amend Article 26 of the Constitution to allow government to compulsorily take possession of private land without prior compensation of the owner, is not constitutionally tenable and raises many people’s eye-brows. The proposed amendment is also in conflict with the United Nations Human Rights Charter on the rights of an individual to own property.
Even by legislative drafting standards, the insertion of the said land reform proposal under Article 26, would distort the intentions of the framers of the 1995 Constitution. Article 26 of the Constitution in its entirety is supported by Articles 1, 20 & 23 of the Constitution and any attempt to amend it would equally call for the amendment of the sister provisions. The President is the Chief custodian of the Constitution. He should, therefore, be the last person to make decisions on the basis of constitutional assumptions. Under Article 26(2)(b) of the Constitution, compulsory acquisition of property like land, must be made under a law on the prompt payment of fair and adequate compensation, prior to the taking of possession of a given land property.
Above all, the President should be proud of the contents of the 1995 Constitution because it is his baby.
Until Parliament enacts the law envisaged in the above provision, the President should not take things for granted. Parliament has not operationalised the above Law and right now, the demands of the President are out of context. The compulsory Land Acquisition Act of 1965 that government has been relying on, is archaic and the Supreme Court recently held that it was in conflict with the 1995 Constitution pursuant to the case of Irumba vs UNRA (2015).
Through his television programme recently, President Museveni was concerned about people who inflate land costs for purposes of enriching themselves. He was also unhappy with the delay in constructing the road infrastructure due to that short-coming. The President’s concerns are genuine and can be addressed in the law Parliament remains to operationalise under the contents of Article 26 (2) (b) of the Constitution. I expected his Deputy Attorney General Rukutana to have brought that to his kind attention during the recent television programme.
The President was tasked to explain why his discussion on land could not wait for the outcome of Justice Bamugemereirwe’s Inquiry Commission. He observed that while Justice Bamugemereirwe’s exercise was an inquiry on land, his was a constitutional proposal restricted to Article 26(2)(b) of the Constitution. The two exercises in my view, are related because when debate on such an amendment begins in Parliament, the general Rule is that any part of the Constitution can be revisited. The Bamugemereirwe’s Report would have covered Museveni’s land concerns.
What is the problem? In 1975, Gen Idi Amin repealed the Busulu/Nvujjo Law and introduced the Land Reform Decree to scrap Mailo land and individual land ownership. He wanted land to be owned by the State. Amin’s pronouncement had no backing of law and was redundant. President Museveni’s land laws since 1998, have not done much in making the public know that land belongs to the people. Since the repeal of the Busulu/Nvujo law in 1975, the bibanja holders have had no security of tenure on the lands they occupy. As a result of the promulgation of the 1995 Constitution, Museveni’s government should have renewed the good relations, which used to exist between the landlords and bibanja holders through the payment of a reasonable periodic land fee to the land-lords in the form of Busulu.
Bibanja holders throughout the Country have remained insecure because Museveni has insisted that no Busulu should exceed Shs1,000 regardless of the location and size of the kibanja in occupation. For the reasons given above, both the landlords and the bibanja holders have ignored the remittance and receipt of Shs1,000 proposed as the Busulu. The President should know that his government’s failure to provide an understanding between the two parties grossly undermines the Articles 237 (8) & (9) of the Constitution.
Finally, I am smelling a rat. The President’s land proposal could have been floated to disengage the bibanja holders from the compensation bids of the land-lords whose lands have been encroached on by road infrastructures.

Mr Ken-Lukyamuzi is former Rubaga South MP & president General Conservative Party