Saga of Departed Asians Property Custodian Board must end now

It is now 47 years since the Idi Amin regime expelled non-Ugandan Asians from our country with tragic consequences. Tragedies have continued happening more or less continuously since then.
Following the expulsion, Asians who were affected sought sanctuary in different parts of the world. The government then established the Departed Asians Property Custodian Board to take care of the properties abandoned.

It generously invited those Asians who were still alive, or who could claim successfully that they were genuine relatives of the departed and expelled, to come forward and claim their shares of the property.
Hundreds of Asians, mostly genuine but others fake, then turned up claiming those properties. There were denunciations by many such claimants that others were not genuine; that they were not what they claimed to be and should be rejected.

Some Ugandans, especially fraudulent officials employed in the Custodian Board, took advantage of this confusion and started reallocating the properties indiscriminately.
They preferred those who could bribe them best, including Ugandans. In their greed, these custodian officials went further and committed other offences such as one I am going to narrate.

This is the case where a senior Custodian Board employee, who is still employed there even today, conspired with the others to deprive a senior citizen of his house he had bought before the Asians were expelled.
It seems this particular employee travels all over Kampala and presumably up and down the country scouting for any empty houses. If found, he declares them departed Asian property, locks them up and possesses them in the name of the Custodian Board.

In this particular case, he made a ghastly mistake. He illegally seized the property of the senior citizen who was renting it out and waiting for a new tenant following the expiry of the former tenant’s contract. In his criminal intent, he allocated the house to a wealthy Ugandan who must have been embarrassed. When in a wheelchair, I led the team that evicted his security men from the house.

We discovered that he had demanded a bribe of Shs10 million from the old man so that the latter could abandon his lawful claim that indeed the house belonged to him and not to the Custodian Board. The Custodian Board fellow should have been arrested and charged with the serious crime of committing fraud, but this is Uganda of today, where most wrongs are right and most innocent are guilty of new types of crimes created for political reasons.

I suggested that Parliament reviews the Penal Code to incorporate new crimes and criminalise activities which were previously non offences.
More importantly, the business of the Custodian Board should be vested in the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development and the Custodian Board should be abolished at the earliest convenient date, presumably before the end of this year.

Finally, the old saying that ‘man eateth where he worketh’ has become a reality in Uganda, otherwise how can government spokespersons, ministers and distinguished leaders, including religious leaders, continue wailing about this national scourge without influencing the NRM government to take action.
On occasions in the past, President Museveni has personally intervened and removed persons accused of corruption and abuse of office and summarily dismissed them.

The action I took on exposing the illegal occupants installed by the Custodian Board was supported by both the President’s Office and of the Prime Minister. It may have been because the victim was a well-known public figure.

I urge the President and Prime Minister to extend a similar helping hand to the rest of the citizens affected by some perennial and self-perpetuating members of the Custodian Board and others like it in the country

Prof Kanyeihamba is a retired Supreme Court judge.
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