In the Busoga sub-region, sugarcane is more than an economic sector. It is a landscape, a labour market and, increasingly, a courtroom. The latest chapter opened when the Deputy Registrar of the High Court Lands Division, Simon Kintu Ziruntusa, issued a temporary injunction against Madhvani Group Limited, Kakira Sugar Works Limited and the Commissioner Land Registration, freezing a disputed transfer at Nakigalala pending the substantive hearing.
The injunction, obtained on an application filed by Benjamin Kalumba Ssebuliba and Robert Kayongo on behalf of the Muwanga Omuwesi family, does not on its face resolve who owns what. It does, however, do something that matters in a place where the paperwork trail has often outpaced the community's ability to contest it: it hits pause.
A wider question in Busoga
Kakira Sugar Works, owned by the Madhvani Group, is Uganda's largest sugar operation and one of the country's biggest private employers. Its out-grower scheme, alongside those of other Busoga sugar mills, has drawn academic scrutiny for years. A study in the Contemporary Journal of African Studies described the alienation of land from smallholder farmers in Busoga through out-grower arrangements as a structural phenomenon, not a series of one-off disputes.
We are not against the sugar industry. We are against being written out of it on our own land.
What to watch
The Nakigalala matter will now proceed to substantive hearing. Whatever the eventual ruling, the injunction is a reminder that Uganda's fastest-growing agricultural sub-region cannot indefinitely paper over unresolved land questions with sugar contracts. Investors, and the government agencies that court them, would be well served by a more open reckoning with how the land was acquired in the first place.
