The State House Anti-Corruption Unit working with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has arraigned before the Masaka Chief Magistrates Court a one Amos Mwesigye, a serial land grabber who has been operating in Gomba District.
Mwesigye was charged with obtaining money by false pretence after he duped a one Steven Kagyeni in a purported 120-acre land sale.
“It is alleged that in 2020, the accused, together with some family members of the late Nasanairi Kinalwa, connived and purportedly purchased 120 acres of titled land from them yet they were not the owners of the said land,” the State House Anti-Corruption Unit said in a statement on Wednesday.
The statement further noted that Mwesigye would later fraudulently sell part of the land to other people in order to frustrate the interest of the registered owner Frank Rushanganwa.
“The suspect has also been using some government officials to subdue the interests of his victims. He has been remanded,” the statements adds.
The statement, however, does not disclose details of the said government officials who were conniving with the suspect.
PrimeNews understands that Mwesigye was in a similar scandal in 2017, in Kyankwanzi District. The land in this case was a 2,560acre estate which belonged to a one Kyeyune Lwembawo, who, before his passing in 1942, entrusted the land to his 3 children through a will.
Unfortunately, 2 of the children died years later leaving ownership to Nanyonjo Bensuseba, the daughter who, in 2017, was already in the twilight of her life as well. Eyeing gaps in a land already compromised by unknown grabbers, Mwesigye approached Nanyonjo’s family offering help to purportedly recover the land that had been unlawfully partitioned.
Typical of his dealings, Mwesigye is said to have connived with officials at Mubende High Court to issue an eviction notice to a seemingly ghost litigant since no respondent by that name ever appeared in court throughout the case proceedings. It was also established that Mwesigye used the notice to evict a person who was not part of the case.
Land grabbing has been defined as an incident where few powerful individuals both multinational and domestic investors grab, lease or replace communities and acquire land that rightfully belongs to the poor for their own interest.
“Parliament through its committee of physical infrastructure has been presented with over 40 pending petitions on irregular allocation of Land from both multinational investors and government and encroachments in the name of development that have been piling over the years,” Parliament Watch, a Parliament monitoring initiative of the Centre for Policy Analysis, notes in an article on land grabbing.