Dude, Where Is My Land?

View from the plot of land
The tractor (Grader) leveling the area

On Monday 16 January 2012, my brother who lives in London, but is now on holiday in Uganda called me in the morning. He wanted me to escort him to his plot of land he bought 10 years ago. I had a few things I was doing, but I respect matters of personal development, so I accepted.

The land is located in Busabala, in Wakiso district close to Kampala city. We live close by, so at the appointed time, I walked to his apartment. We set off at around 11.00am. We drove for almost 40 minutes and we reached the place. He could not easily find the access road that is off the main road. After several trials, he finally got his bearings.

We drove uphill for a couple of minutes only to find that the road that he was familiar with had been blocked. We parked at someone’s homestead nearby. My brother asked the owners of the home where the new road to his land was. He was told that some Arabs had bought the land where the previous road was and had fenced it off. Now owners of land behind that property had to make a longer detour to access their land.

The lady allowed us to go through her homestead in order to get to the property. When we reached at the top of the hill, we found an earth-moving tractor busy leveling the land. My brother approached the men and asked them who gave them the authority to level his land. They responded in a polite way that they were just assigned the job by the owner of the land. They actually called him on mobile phone to come and settle the conflict.

Within 20 minutes the boss had come accompanied by 3 people. He was calm and asked us what we wanted. My brother also acted cool and told him that there seemed to be some mistake as people were leveling his land! The guy explained that he had bought that piece of land from a certain professor of Makerere University. He explained to my brother that his neighbor was a guy who worked in Uganda Breweries. It then occurred to my brother that he had made a mistake. Because the drive way had been changed, he assumed the first plot was his!

“All's well that ends well”. Prov. Cliché An event that has a good ending is good even if some things went wrong along the way. (This is the name of a play by Shakespeare.)

We were happy to realize that there was a mistaken identity, and the land was still available, and that we had a very good considerate neighbor. I other parts of the country, land cases are determined by who is stronger. Many deaths have been reported over minor land ownership quarrels. We were lucky to leave the place with all our faculties intact.