The High Court's Land Division has frozen a disputed transfer, reviving a long-running argument in Busoga about who benefits from Uganda's biggest sugar operation.
By Miriam Achieng..Busoga Sub-Region.6 min read
Busoga Sub-Region. July 30, 2024.
AccountabilityAgriculture & Land
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, get 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, but 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.
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We are not against the sugar industry. We are against being written out of it on our own land.
Family representative, Nakigalala, in local media coverage
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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.
What the law says, and what enforcement looks like
Uganda's land laws recognise both registered titles and customary claims, a duality that has repeatedly produced disputes of exactly this kind across Busoga's sugar belt, where colonial-era land budgets to large estates sit on top of generations of customary occupation. The High Court's Land Division has increasingly used interim injunctions to freeze contested transfers while ownership questions are resolved, a procedural tool that gives smallholder claimants breathing room they rarely had a decade ago.
Madhvani Group has said publicly that it operates within the law and that disputed transactions were conducted through proper legal channels, a position it is expected to argue in full once the Nakigalala matter reaches substantive hearing. Land rights advocates counter that the legality of a paper transfer does not settle the fairness of the underlying acquisition, especially where the original alienation happened decades ago under weaker documentation standards.
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The title deed tells you who signed. It does not tell you who understood what they were signing, or when.
Land rights advocate, Jinja
What analysts will be watching is whether the substantive hearing produces a published judgment that clarifies how out-grower land arrangements should be documented going forward. This is becausethe same pattern of contested transfers recurs across multiple sugar estates in Busoga and a clear precedent could reshape practice well beyond Nakigalala.
Evidence & documents
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01Nakigalala Land Row: Madhvani Group, Kakira Sugar Works dealt huge blow as court rules in favour of Muwanga Omuwesi family▾
