Kampala–Entebbe Expressway: whose land is it, and does the road care?

By early 2021, roughly seven years after land acquisition began, the Uganda National Roads Authority reported that of 4,535 Project Affected Persons evaluated for compensation along the Kampala–Entebbe Expressway, 3,100 had been paid and 1,435 had not.[1] The unpaid claims concentrated in one section: the densely built, heavily urbanised stretch from the proposed Impala interchange through Nkumba, Abayiti Ababiri and Kitubulu-Katabi to the State House area on the old Entebbe road.[1]

That concentration is the pattern worth noting before anything else. Compensation delay on a corridor project is rarely spread evenly. It pools in the sections where tenure is most contested and valuation is hardest to agree — which on this road meant the urbanised stretch, where density, mixed formal and informal occupation, and higher land values all make a claim harder to close than a rural parcel with a single owner.

Delay does not distribute itself randomly across a corridor. It concentrates exactly where tenure was already contested.

A title dispute that reached the road from somewhere else

In August 2017, Prince Harold Kalemera — cousin of the reigning Kabaka of Buganda and administrator of the estate of the late Prince Henry Kimera — petitioned court to halt compensation pending determination of ownership over land registered as Block 273 Masajja. The royals' claim was that this land, on which both the Kampala-Jinja Expressway and the Kampala–Entebbe Expressway pass, forms part of the private estate of Chwa II, the 34th Kabaka of Buganda, restored to the Kabaka's holdings in 1993.[2] The respondents were named as the Kabaka of Buganda himself, the Buganda Land Board, and the Commissioner for Land Registration.[2]

UNRA's response was to halt the project, with 80% of compensation stalled while the ownership question was litigated.[2] The case was dismissed on a technicality in July 2018 — the complainants were not present in court on the day, itself the product of a rescheduled hearing date that fell on a public holiday declared for local council elections[2] — and the royals applied to have that dismissal set aside, on the basis that the substantive dispute had never actually been heard.

Whatever the eventual resolution, the mechanism is the lesson. A single contested title, asserted by a party with the standing and resources to litigate, froze compensation across two separate expressway projects at once — not because most claimants on either road were disputed, but because the acquiring authority could not safely disburse against a chain of title that a court might unwind.

Why mailo tenure makes this the rule, not the exception

Buganda operates under mailo tenure — land held under a title granted historically to the Kabaka, chiefs and notables, with lawful and bona fide occupants holding protected interests on the same land independently of the registered proprietor.[3] This site's paper on mailo, customary and leasehold interests in Uganda RAPs makes the point that a mailo title and an occupant's protected interest are not competing claims to be resolved in favour of one — they are two simultaneously valid interests in the same parcel, and a RAP that compensates only the registered proprietor has not resolved the occupant's claim, only ignored it.

A corridor running through mailo land is running through a tenure system where competing, simultaneously legitimate claims are the ordinary case rather than the anomaly. That is what makes the Buganda Land Board's involvement here structurally significant beyond this one dispute: BLB administers a large share of Kampala's mailo estate, and any corridor crossing it should expect title questions of this kind as a planning assumption, not a contingency.

What the register had to carry

• Title-chain status as a distinct field, separate from payment status — a parcel under active dispute needs to be visible as such in the register, with the dispute's parties, forum and status, not merely absent from the paid list.
• Escrow or deposit provision for disputed parcels, so that a title contest over one claimant does not require freezing disbursement to every other claimant on the same corridor. Nothing in the reported record here indicates such a mechanism was used to separate the 20% of undisputed compensation from the 80% that was stalled.
• Occupant and proprietor interests recorded as separate entitlement lines on mailo land, so a dispute between proprietor claimants does not, by itself, block payment to lawful occupants whose interest is independent of the title question — the eligibility distinction PS-5 itself requires between a right to land and a right to compensation for what stands on it.[4]
• Section-level delay reporting, since the 1,435 outstanding claims concentrated in one identifiable stretch — a project-wide completion percentage would have concealed exactly the information UNRA needed to target the bottleneck.

What this article does not establish

The compensation figures — 4,535 evaluated, 3,100 paid, 1,435 outstanding — are drawn from contemporaneous reporting rather than a project register, to which this article had no access; Monitor's hosting infrastructure blocks some automated retrieval, so these figures are corroborated across independent reporting rather than fetched directly, and readers should confirm them against UNRA's own disclosure before relying on them. The Block 273 Masajja dispute is described here from a single contemporaneous report of the 2018 procedural ruling; this article does not know the case's eventual outcome or whether the dismissal was in fact set aside. Nothing here establishes fault on the part of UNRA, the Buganda Land Board, or any individual claimant. This is not legal advice on Ugandan land law or on mailo tenure.