Brig Isoke & NEMA demolish houses in wetlands
Brig Isoke & NEMA have demolished houses in wetlands. In a bid to demand for illegal compensation from government ahead of Jinja Express highway construction, the greedy group had put an impression that they owned the wetlands and so they would be paid.
However this was proved impossible after the State House Anti-Corruption Unit and NEMA got track of the ill intentions.
And in a joint operation, the STH_ACU, Environmental Police and National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) on Tuesday, June 7, 2022, demolished illegal structures and plantations in the wetland known as Monkey Village, Butabika in Kampala.
This comes as a follow-up to an inspection that was done on the Kinawataka drainage channel. The findings established that the encroachers had built in the wetlands contrary to Article 245 of the Constitution.
They had earlier been served with eviction notices. The land became a hot issue after some people in connivance with officials of the Ministry of Land and other departments in the government started selling off land and forcefully evicting others in anticipation of compensation from the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) ahead of the Kampala-Jinja Expressway Road project.
President Museveni has been warning wetland encroachers even yesterday while addressing Ugandans in the State of Nation Address at Kololo, he repeated the warning.
Earlier on he tweeted, ” God created wetlands/swamps to be reservoirs of water, not gardens. God blessed Uganda abundantly, but disobedience is causing famine.”
In 2017 President Museveni gave wetland encroachers in the country one month to leave or be forced out by the police.
President Museveni, who was launching a new water pumping station and a pipeline worth 38m Euros [about Shs146b] in Gaba, a Kampala suburb, spoke about the need to protect the environment and asked the authorities to act on the degraders before it’s too late.
“All those occupying swamps should leave in peace before police comes for them. If you have planted crops, harvest, and go away,” Mr Museveni said.
President Museveni blamed the current scarcity of water caused by drought in different parts of the country on environmental degradation.