How government attempted to acquire NUP’s Kavule land to foil its ambition to establish a headquarters

The National Unity Platform (NUP) president, Robert Kyagulanyi Sentamu, has revealed that in an attempt to fail them, the government tried to buy the land where they erected their headquarters in Kavule – Makerere but the land owners refused.

Kyagulanyi, also known as Bobi Wine, said the land owners believed in NUP’s cause and stood their ground much to the chagrin of the government people.

Bobi Wine in a message on social media reveals that upon unveiling the land at Kavule in July last year, government people approached the neighbours who owned buildings in front of the NUP headquarters and asked to buy them.

He says people in government were surprised to see such a development by NUP, a party that is barely three years old. He added that the government wanted to put a security facility near their office so that they could monitor them properly.

The NUP leader also revealed that the regime has bought the land surrounding his home in Magere and stationed security operatives there.

“Certainly, if the regime had bought those two buildings, we would have been incapacitated to do much on the land we had acquired because they would be seeing everything going on at our offices,” Bobi Wine said.

He added that the regime had offered much more money than they had offered the land owners; however, they refused to sell to the government people. “Abantu n’abagambaki (what will I tell the public), Bobi Wine quotes the land owners saying.

“They chose to be patient, withstanding so much pressure until we got the money to pay them. One of them had to lie to the people who were approaching him constantly that we had already paid a deposit, even when we had not,” said Kyagulanyi.

The two buildings now seen to have been remodelled into offices of NUP headquarters, were owned by two unnamed individuals. Bobi Wine described these landowners as unsung heroes of the cause.

Upon acquiring part of the land, NUP went ahead to purchase another building which was a residential and now houses several offices as well as another vacant plot- giving the party a total of six plots.

“As we said at the launch, most of the titles have already been transferred into NUP’s name. The remaining ones are in the pipeline. I thought it’s important to highlight that many people out there may not stand at the frontline but they are in the background making sacrifices,”

At the end of last week, with tensions running high, party members of NUP, including MPs and guests were denied access to the shiny new building.

Heavily armed soldiers and police ordered them to leave or face arrest. Across the division, and especially in the Makerere Kavule area, security was heightened and traffic disrupted, with the police saying the heavy deployment was in anticipation of public disorder.

Relations between NUP and the security forces, as is the case with other opposition groups, remain frosty. The political opposition has long been at the receiving end of violent repression of their activities by the police and military — whom they accuse of being partisan forces, hell-bent on abusing their constitutional rights to freedom of assembly, among others.