The State Minister for Lands Dr Sam Mayanja has said there’s an urgent need for the judiciary to come up with special courts to handle specifically land matters as a way of solving the increasing land case backlogs.
Dr Mayanja made this call yesterday while addressing the country on the performance of his ministry as far as the fulfilment of the National Resistance Movement manifesto 2021-2026 is concerned. He said that current courts are overwhelmed with other civil cases and have failed to handle land cases on time.
“Chief Justice has been putting a lot of pressure on His Excellency the President to give him more support so that he can appoint more judges and magistrates so that backlog cases can be quickly handled, but I think we should borrow a leaf from other countries. Some countries have come up with special courts to handle land matters. I saw how Bamugemereire’s commission was handling cases, it was too swift. Cases were handled immediately, that is what is needed even in normal courts,” he said on Friday at the Office of Prime Minister.
He added that land cases take a long time to be disposed of which has inversely worked in favour of land grabbers who have continuously used money and power to take over people’s land knowing very well the weaknesses of courts as far as land matters are concerned.
“Sincerely someone is taking over my land, I go and file a case which case will be heard next year and when next year comes, the magistrate pushes it over for about 8 months, this looks unfair to a poor Ugandan. We have cases like that of Dr Kasasa which has spent over 20 years in court but it has never been heard substantially. If he filed it when he was 50 years now is 70 the case has never been hard! I think there is a case for special courts for land matters,” he said.
He urged that land matters should be also categorized like how it was done on commercial courts.
“A special division commercial court was put there with a specific timeline to handle cases and it has been working properly. Let’s also have something special for land so that when somebody files a case like today, by law he/she will know that 10 days it will be disposed of.”
He also added that special land courts will also reduce levels of corruption within land matters.
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