By Peter Ssebulime
Kampala: Nakawa court Magistrate Tadeo Asiimwe on Wednesday postponed hearing of the case in which city businessman Medard Kiconco is accused of allegedly evicting several families from land in Lusanja, Mpererwe zone in Kawempe division, in October 2018.
The case was adjourned to August 2nd, 2019 following the failure of the Estate Administrator Paul Katabazi to appear before court.
In the same vein, Magistrate Asiimwe directed the applicants to bring all witnesses/evidence before court to ensure justice and proper handling of the case.
Luyimbazi Nulukoola, one of applicants’ lawyers, asked them to be more calm and give court time to execute its work. However he expressed grievances about how court is handling this case, saying that its speed is so slow, yet they need time to produce more evidence because the complainants are very many, which makes it hard to gather information from them.
Some of the complainants who we spoke to said they want justice to prevail, because they lost many of their properties worth millions of shillings. They claimed that the failure of the Estate Administrator to appear is being spearheaded by defendant (Kiconco).
However, it should be noted that in December 2018 the High Court nullified the eviction of hundreds of families whose property worth millions of Shillings was destroyed in during the eviction. High Court Judge John Eudes Keitirima ruled that the Chief Magistrates Court at Nabweru had no authority to order the eviction. “The execution was a nullity as it was based on a decision that was issued by a court without competent jurisdiction. Determining the merits or the demerits of the execution process would, therefore, be superfluous,” Justice Keitirima ruled.
Justice Keitirima ordered that any aggrieved party in the land dispute should institute their suit in a court with competent jurisdiction, hence the ongoing case at Nakawa Court, which has been dragging on for long.
The land in dispute is part of a chunk of about 85 acres that the late Paul Bitarabeho bought in 1978 from the late mother of King Mwanga, Namasole Bagalaayeze Lunkusu. He set up a farm that stretched from Mpererwe in Kampala to Lusanja and Kitetikka villages in Wakiso district.
Some of the land in Mpererwe was sold to the defunct Kampala City Council (KCC), which gazetted it in 1996 as a landfill for garbage disposal although the sale proved catastrophic because of environmental pollution. The other part was bought by several people who settled on it until Kiconco evicted them from it with the help of police. Many of the evictees have since resorted to sleeping in tents with no food and water, only surviving on handouts from Good Samaritans.
