The National Forestry Authority (NFA) has rejected plans by Kampala Capital City Authority-KCCA to use part of the Buto-Buvuma central forest land in Buyala as a landfill.
Stuart Maniraguha, the NFA Acting Executive Director, said that the planned landfill site was illegally obtained by KCCA because it is part of a forest reserve.
He added that the 230-acre piece of land is among the many fraudulent land titles that have been created in forest reserves.
“There is no way the government can buy its land, and if there is anyone claiming to own that land, that should not be accepted. We are fully aware most of the land titles in this forest were illegally created, and we asked the Ministry of Lands to cancel them because all the demarcations and boundaries are very clear,” he said.
According to Maniraguha, NFA has had several engagements with KCCA to avoid the possibility of illegally acquiring forest reserve land through fake land titles by unscrupulous individuals.
Though the earlier meetings yielded fruits, KCCA went mute in the last two weeks after NFA wrote to them upon learning about the latest acquisition of the land in Buyala, where clearing works of the site are ongoing.
Maniraguha said that the interests of the licensed tree farmers end with the trees they could have planted, not the land. He emphasized that even transferring the interests from one person to another calls for sanctioning by NFA.
“The efforts to conserve this forest are still on, and we are going to ensure that its integrity is not compromised at any moment,” he noted, adding that NFA is to prosecute any licensed farmers found to have been involved in such discussions with KCCA, and the environmental police have already been mobilized.
He said that in a bid to address the garbage challenge faced by KCCA, NFA can amicably avail a site for waste management, not dumping, following a stringent impact assessment program to allow the coexistence of conservation efforts while effectively managing the city garbage.
“Waste management is not foreign to protected areas. You have a waste management treatment facility in Lubigi, among other installations. As long as we have concluded the feasibility study and the waste management strategy, there are possibilities of accepting such a site in a forest, as long as we can manage the impact that the waste management would come along with.”
Buto-Buvuma Central Forest Reserve is a main catchment area for River Mayanja, a key contributor to Lake Victoria, and its destruction has ripple effects on the entire Victoria basin biodiversity ecosystem.
Daniel Nuw’abine, the KCCA Spokesperson, told this website that KCCA did its due diligence before procuring the land from three people. He however declined to reveal the identities and the price.
“KCCA did due diligence before purchasing that land, and if NFA had any issues with the proprietor of that land, it was settled by the court,” he said, adding that the court ruled the ownership dispute of the land in question in favour of the current proprietor, not NFA.
Last year, the NFA revealed that there are 703 illegal land titles in different forest reserves. The discoveries were made during the process to ascertain the extent of forest degradation.
According to NFA, all the titles were submitted to the Ministry of Lands for verification, and the first batch of 438 were confirmed to be located in forest reserves. The titles are mainly located in forests in Wakiso, Kayunga and Kampala.
In 2023, Members of Parliament tasked the Ministry of Water and Environment to withdraw more than 1,000 land titles illegally created on various forest reserves across the country.
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