Parliament rejects proposal to merge NFA

Parliament on Thursday rejected the National Forestry and Tree Planting (Amendment) Bill 2024 in which government proposed to merge the National Forestry Authority (NFA) with its mother Ministry of Water and Environment.

The recommendation to maintain the Authority as a semi-autonomous entity was made by the House committee on environment and natural resources through its report to House. The committee was seconded by almost the entire House with legislators arguing that NFA plays a critical role in protecting the environment and mitigating effects of climate change.

The committee reported that “the ministry responsible for environment should stick to its core mandate of policy formulation, establishment of standards, resource mobilization, offering support supervision and allow NFA to do its mandate of managing and conserving forest cover in the country.”
Presenting the committee report to Parliament on Wednesday, the chairperson of the committee, Mr Emmanuel Otaala, revealed that members observed that NFA was still sorting out the encroachment problems and licensing of new investments in the forestry sector.

“There is a general feeling of uncertainty amongst the commercial tree farmers that mainstreaming NFA to the ministry may expose their plantations to risk of land grabbers, encroachment and theft of the assets as a result of reduced protection,” the report read in part.
“About 120 illegal titles created in forest reserves were cancelled in 2O19 and the process to cancel over 400 additional illegal titles is ongoing. There is high risk that this process will be jeopardized with mainstreaming the Authority to the Ministry and hence loss of government forest land and resultant forest degradation,” it added.

The same House committee argued that that there may not be significant economic gains in the short and medium term arising out of mainstreaming NFA into the ministry, emphasizing that the elimination of the authority board of directors, their salaries are relatively very small in comparison to the overall cost of sustainably managing and developing central forest reserves.
The committee report was backed by a number of legislators, including Keefa Kiwanuka, Muhammad Nsereko, Christine Kaaya, Alex Byarugaba, Bosco Okiror, Denis Oguzu, Ojara Martin Mapenduzi and David Kabanda, among others.
However, the minister of water and environment, Ms Beatrice Anywar, unsuccessfully defended the government proposal to dissolve NFA, explaining that NFA will continue to ably perform its functions despite the proposed merger.

“All the NFA efforts that have been eluded here by the colleagues who have been under the supervision of the ministry and NFA will continue to do its functions because we are transferring the functions to the ministry,” she said.
Meanwhile, Parliament okayed the amendment bills to rationalize government entities such as Uganda Export Promotions Board, Uganda Wildlife Authority, Uganda Wildlife Conservation Education Centre, Warehouse Receipt Systems and Free Zones Authority.