In Uganda a commission of inquiry into land matters has been working since March 2017 and is due to report in 2018. It has involved a ruthless exposure of corruption in most of the state agencies responsible for governing and regulating land and has delivered a long list of interim recommendations to President Museveni. This paper examines both existing land law and the proposed changes in relation to the actual land issues being experienced by individuals and communities in northern Uganda. Here the overwhelming form of tenure is ’customary’; however the term may be misleading. It is the legal default status of most land that is not otherwise titled or gazetted, which is to say any land that is locally or privately regulated. But it is also often used to refer to an only partially overlapping category of land: that which is occupied, held and managed in diverse ways that are embedded in the different cultural and social lives of groups of people. Hence much peri-urban land is customary in the first, legal, but not the second, sociological, sense, while there are occasional instances of customary land in the second sense which is nonetheless titled (and hence not legally customary).
The most notable and consistent feature of socially customary land (which from now I refer to as ‘cultural land’) throughout northern Uganda is its collective and communal nature – land belongs to groups of people, usually related, though in far more varied ways than either classical anthropology (Girling 1960) or recent advocacy (Ker Kwaro Acholi 2006) argue. Using as a theoretical lens the notion of public authority from below, and data from over five years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Acholi sub-region, I explore how different authorities interact with cultural land holders and how national policy and formal law impact them. These impacts are rarely straightforward as the language of law, policy and advocacy rarely describes the realities of most Acholi land. Most significantly, not only are cultural land-holding groups not legal personae, but are not able with integrity to so become – they are too fluid, their membership is too inexact and negotiable. These cultural land-holding groups, although forming the overwhelming majority of the rural population across northern Uganda (albeit with substantially different issues in the pastoralist region of Karamoja) are almost completely unrecognised in the current policy debate, though existing law is surprisingly accommodating. Observation of justice, law and order sector (JLOS) actors in northern Uganda suggests the sector is largely commercialised, such that in most cases ‘services’ including the arrest, criminal charging and imprisonment of ones enemies, and the dropping of charges and release of ones friends and family, can be bought. In civil cases – as most land cases are when they start – permanent deferral is the most common process, which again can be purchased (exceptions include high profile cases, and where both parties are members of the educated middle class).
The ways in which cultural land-holding groups and public authorities, including state legal actors, interact is important in understanding likely impacts of proposed legal and regulatory changes. Recent years have seen growing enthusiasm on the part of government and donors for titling programmes, and a push for this, backed by legislation, is one of the land commission’s recommendations. In practice – though it is often argued otherwise - these are incompatible with the survival of most existing land holdings, yet bodies including the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) enthusiastically fund such programmes. I aim to show that the outcome of the breakdown of cultural land holding groups, pursuant on titling programmes, is likely to lead to a rapid increase in extreme poverty and destitutions in large numbers of the rural poor across the north.