Eighteen years after the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) acquired a chunk of land in Temangalo, Wakiso District, its long-standing ownership dispute has once more taken centre stage, with Parliament probing why the Fund has failed to take full possession of its property.
Yesterday, the Parliament’s Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (Cosase) inspected the NSSF land as part of its investigation into queries raised by the Auditor General in his 2023 value-for-money report.
The contested land
At the centre of the query is 55 acres of the 463 acres of the controversial land that NSSF bought from businessman Amos Nzeyi and Arma Ltd at Sh11 billion in 2008.
Despite the Fund securing the land titles in its name, Mr Nzeyi has continued using the 55 acres of the land, leaving NSSF with no access.
As the legislators inspected the contested portion of the land yesterday, it remained occupied by animals on the farm, farmhouses and a residential house, which NSSF said belongs to Mr Nzeyi, the seller.
“When we moved to the 55 acres of land in question, it was fenced off, even NSSF could not lead us through. They also have no access to the land,” Mr Muwada Nkunyingi, the Cosase chairperson said during the visit to the land.
Mr Muwada said the committee intends to summon both the Fund and Mr Nzeyi next Monday for an interrogation on why he has continued to deny access to the land even when he had sold off the land.
But Mr Isaac Ogwang, the NSSF’s senior manager for enforcement and litigation, told the committee that the Fund is in the process of evicting Mr Nzeyi after the expiry of the eviction notice he was given on June 15, 2026, giving him until the end of the same month.
With the deadline having passed without the disputed portion being handed over to NSSF, Mr Ogwang said the Fund has started the process of securing a court order to evict the occupants.
“We have to get a court order for the eviction and the process has started,” Mr Ogwang said.
Responding to why it has taken them unnecessarily long to get access to the land, the NSSF managing director, Mr Patrick Michael Ayota, said they have been battling court cases, which delayed the process.
“In Uganda, anybody will take you to court for anything and you will have to go through that process until it goes through, you can’t do much. We can’t break somebody’s leg as some other people may do. We have to be legal as an entity,” he said.
During the visit, the MPs also noted that part of the 72 acres is being developed for the Temangalo housing project, where 550 units are under construction by a Chinese contractor, Henan Guoji Industry Group.
Even as the MPs were impressed with the development, the committee members expressed concern over the sizes of the rooms, saying they were small and had dilapidated walls in some of the incomplete units.
MPs’ queries
“We sought the technical documentation to ascertain the size of the rooms because the contractor said her duty was to put into practice what she was given. We now need to seek clarity on the size of the rooms, which appear rather small. But we shall also need a technical explanation,” Mr Nkunyingi said.
The MPs also visited other NSSF assets, including the land and housing estate in Lubowa, off the Kampala-Entebbe highway; the buildings in Kampala, including the Pension House at Nakasero, whose completion they said had stalled.
The building, which started in 2018, was supposed to be completed in three years, but has since taken seven years, with the Fund now saying it will be completed by the end of January 2027.
Mr Ayota said the project was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the works to be halted for some time.
“There were delays, but some of them were beyond our control. We started this phase in 2018, and the idea was to do it in three years, but Covid came and closed us for two years. Even when construction was allowed to go on, we lost close to 75 percent of our workforce because they couldn’t come and attend, which had a major impact on what we have in this place,” Mr Ayota said.
Background
The contested Temangalo land ownership involves a 463-acre property in Wakiso District, it centres on a 2008 deal where NSSF bought land from Mr Nzeyi and former prime minister Amama Mbabazi for Sh11 billion, which later triggered a multi-layered fraud and political corruption investigation.