Locals reject NFA plan to restore forest

The National Forestry Authority (NFA) has rekindled its plan to restore depleted forest reserves within Lake Kijjanebalora catchment area in Rakai District.

According to NFA, more than 20,000 residents in Lake Kijjanebalora catchment area are occupying forest reserves which have been depleted over the years and they want them restored.

The forest reserves NFA seeks to recover are in the sub-counties of Kagamba, Kyalulangira, Kacheera and Kiziba, measuring between 5,000 and 8,000 hectares.

Ms Aisha Alibhai, the NFA spokesperson, said the move to restore the depleted forest reserves is aimed at saving the country from future negative impacts of climate change.

 “We are not targeting those people in Rakai, we have an ongoing countrywide boundary opening exercise and evicting people who illegally settled on NFA land,” she said during an interview on Tuesday.

Ms Alibhai said many of the affected residents in the four sub-counties occupied NFA land in the 1970s well knowing that it was forest land and are responsible for cutting down all the trees in the area.

“Our team has engaged those people several times in the past and the plan to reclaim what belongs to us will not be a surprise to them,” she added.

However, the affected residents are vowing not to vacate the disputed land, insisting that they have nowhere else to go.
They are instead asking government to degazette the forest reserves and allow them to settle peacefully since there are no trees to prove that there were forests before they settled in the areas.

 “The NFA officials came to our area about three years ago and their aim was to tell us to vacate this land, saying we had illegally settled on it. We explained to them that this place has never been a forest and they cannot restore something that never existed,” Mr John Magaro, the chairperson of Kacheera Sub-county, explained.
  
Mr Magaro further said the land which NFA wants to reclaim has seven private and 12 government schools respectively, 17 churches, three public and nine private health facilities, which were constructed in a move to improve service delivery.

Mr Mustapha Baingana, a resident of Kizinga Village in Kyarurangira Sub-county, wondered why NFA has taken years to open boundaries on land it claims to own. He instead accused NFA of plotting to encroach on their private land.

“NFA was not created yesterday, why are they coming up now to open boundaries? We are smelling a rat,” he said.

But Ms Alibhai said residents who claim to be outside the forest reserve boundaries will not be affected. 

“People should know that a forest reserve doesn’t necessarily mean trees. Many of the reserves we have reclaimed had no trees, but we have planted new ones,” she explained.

The Rakai District Woman MP, Ms Juliet Kinyamatama, asked government to instead degazette the forest land.

“Residents have a right to oppose NFA planned activities in the area because there is no clear relocation plan,” she said. 
She said the affected residents have permanent houses and farms on the disputed land and that government has over the years put infrastructures to ease service delivery in the area.

“A lot of infrastructures such as roads, schools and hospitals have been set up on that land by the government and if NFA turns up now to evict these people, all that investment will be put to waste, which is unfair,” Ms Kinyamatama added.

BACKGROUND
Over the recent years, large tracts of government forest reserves have been cleared and President Museveni has on a number of occasions publicly expressed displeasure at the performance of NFA, saying it is doing little to protest the forests.

Some forecasts gloomily predict that private land will not have forests in the next 10 years. This is backed by evidence from a 2016 Joint Water and Environment Sector Review Report  that revealed that Uganda’s  forest cover had reduced from 24 per cent in 1990 to just 11 per cent in 2015.

 Uganda’s Vision 2040 targets restoration of the country’s forest cover from 15 per cent in 2010 to 24 per cent by 2040.