Mucunguzi lied about land for Bududa landslide victims

The notion that a common man suffers at the expense of those in power holds, to me, a lot of water. This was evident in the article penned by my professional friend and a namesake, Mr Julius Mucunguzi, titled ‘Here is the truth about government land for resettling’.

Mr Mucunguzi is the head of communications in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), so to a layman in Bunambutye and Bugisu Sub-region as a whole, may not know the magnitude of his misinformation.
But as a journalist who has covered the issues of landslides in Bugisu since 2010, a lot of explanation is still needed from OPM other than what Mr Mucunguzi wrote.

His article may serve the donors but not the suffering common man. These people even reached an extent of stripping before OPM officials (including Mr Mucunguzi) when they visited Bunambutye in Bulambuli District a few weeks ago.
What Mr Mucunguzi wrote does not in any way attempt to answer the questions people in Bugisu have asked. Instead, it only explains how OPM responded to the President’s directive to promptly relocate the most vulnerable people in Bugisu and the three resettlement strategies.

In actual sense, people in Bugisu and probably countrywide want to know how the land was acquired, where exactly, at what cost, from who?

People in Bunambutye are crying that they have been evicted from their own ancestral land, which Mr Mucunguzi in his article does not make any mention of at all.

The Bulambuli Woman MP, Ms Sarah Wekoba, in a meeting between Bugisu leaders and OPM sometime back, confessed that eight sub-counties in Bulambuli, including Bunambutye Sub-county, are all waterlogged and are prone to floods. Mr Mucunguzi, as a communications specialist, can explain to the public why the MP contradicted herself with the findings of OPM that resulted in the acquisition of the wetland by OPM. And if the land has no issues radiating around ownership, why is it that there is a military detach in Bunambutye patrolling the said plots?

The Parliamentary committee that visited Bunambutye to assess the land a few weeks after OPM officials went there raised many questions and concluded that the land is a wetland.

In his article, Mr Mucunguzi says due diligence was extensively done involving the community, PPDA, Ministry of Lands, Uganda Registration Service Bureau, CIID, DPP and the district leaders. If that was done, why then are some locals from Bunambutye protesting over the same land?

Mr Mucunguzi again says OPM carried out administrative field visit reviews and political consultations involving halting the procurement process to allow complainants and district leaders to meet the responsible political leaders of before procurement and that he participated in some of those field visits. So, let him tell the public which community did the OPM meet in order to discuss the procurement of the land in Bunambutye? When and where was the meeting?

People in Bunambutye want to know how the Elgon County MP, Mr Mudimi Wamakuyu ( the purported seller), obtained such a huge chunk of land in Bunambutye Sub-county yet he is not from there.

Can Mr Mucunguzi tell the public the names of the two villages where those three plots of land are located? Explain to the public why the land in question was surveyed at night? And how did Mr Wamakuyu get the powers of the attorney to represent the people of Bunambutye to sell their land?

And in case Mr Wamakuyu received the money for that land, whom did he give the it to and from where? Did those beneficiaries sign anywhere and who are they?

Mr Mucunguzi, as the OPM mouthpiece, why didn’t OPM pay the individual owners of the said land and instead pay through Mr Wamakuyu?

Mr Odeke-Onyango is a journalist and a resident in Bugisu sub-region.
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