Walking through Republic Street, Naboa Road, Pallisa Road, or Kumi Road in Mbale City, you don’t see the signs of a growing city.
Instead, you see old, cracked buildings with peeling paint and collapsing verandas, once proud commercial spaces now left to rot. Many of these buildings are nearly 100 years old and have been neglected for decades. Some are stuck in complicated ownership battles, with no one taking responsibility to fix or develop them.
Back in 1972, when President Idi Amin forced Asians to leave Uganda, their shops, homes, and plots, including many in Mbale, were handed over to Ugandans through a government body called the Departed Asians Property Custodian Board. But 50 years later, confusion caused by that same board, along with the Uganda Land Commission, has left many of these properties in a legal mess. Some plots have been given to several people at once, leading to constant court cases.
Mr Yasin Kawanguzi, a lawyer and former city leader, said, ‘We see ramshackle buildings in the middle of town because ownership is unclear.
No one invests in property they are battling for in court,’ he said. One example is a building on plots 33 and 35 on Pallisa Road. It was torn down in May 2024 for being unsafe, even though a family claiming ownership protested the demolition.
Over a year later, the prime plot still sits empty at the city entrance.
This problem is not limited to one street. Almost every major road in the city centre, Naboa Road, Bishop Wasike Road, Republic Street, Kumi Road, and Pallisa Road, has buildings stuck in ownership disputes.
Locals call them ‘ghost buildings’, run-down, neglected, and stuck in legal battles. City leaders blame the Departed Asians Property Custodian Board and the Uganda Land Commission for giving out ownership documents to multiple people for the same buildings.
Mr Namugali, a city leader, said, ‘These properties were never properly returned to the city. Some buildings have five or more people claiming ownership, each with a letter from a different government office.’ Because of this, investors are staying away, and the city looks abandoned in some places.
Another example is Plot 29 on Republic Street, where a long-standing dispute continues. The family of the late Zubair Magomu said they bought the property in 1972 and later formalised ownership. But someone else claiming to represent the original Indian owners later showed up with papers and evicted the Magomu family.
Community leader Robert Mudebo said this is a national issue, but worse in Mbale.
He added: ‘One building can be claimed by 10 different people. Who will spend money renovating a property they could lose tomorrow?’ he added. Residents believe the only way Mbale can grow into a modern city is if the government sets clear rules to settle these ownership issues.
Mr Abdulsalam Namonye, who has led the North Road Cell since 1986, said: ‘All over town, buildings are falling apart because of court cases.
The custodian board should fix these disputes instead of letting middlemen profit.’ He also said his building on Plot 8, Kumi-North Road, was taken from him unfairly in 2005.
A past land investigation by the Bamugemereire Land Inquiry exposed how some people used fake claims to grab hundreds of these properties. Mr Joseph Kibande, a senior official from the Ministry of Lands, said the mess is not the ministry’s fault.
‘The custodian board is responsible for these properties. We only help those who have been cleared by the board,’ he said. Attempts to get a comment from the Departed Asians Property Custodian Board were unsuccessful by the press.
The Departed Asians Property Custodian Board, created by a 1973 law, was meant to manage the properties left behind after Asians were expelled. But decades later, the same board is now being blamed for the confusion that has left Mbale’s City centre crumbling.
Background
Mbale was officially declared a city on July 1, 2020. It was one of the first towns to be granted city status in Uganda, with Jinja, Mbarara, Gulu, and others also elevated at the same time. Mbale was previously an urban municipality. The elevation was part of a broader initiative by the government to create new cities.