‘For Sale’ or ‘Not For Sale’?

COMMENT | CRISPIN KAHERU | Somewhere in Kampala today, a signboard reads “For Sale”. Passersby are nodding knowingly. They have worked it out. The name is right there, embedded in the transaction. Sale. Salim “Sale(h)”. It is practically a confession. Somewhere else, another board reads “Not For Sale.” The nodding continues. Of course he would say that. Denial is the oldest form of confession or ownership in Uganda.

This is the trap of perception in which General Caleb Akandwanaho, known to the republic as Salim Saleh, now finds himself. In a country where rumour often outruns fact, every unexplained property acquires his name, every denial deepens suspicion, and every ‘For Sale’ sign risks being read as ‘For Saleh’.

One could laugh and leave it there. Except that the absurdity has a serious address. It sits at the intersection of a fragile land information system and one of humanity’s oldest social reflexes. When people cannot tell who owns something, they assign ownership to whoever seems most plausible. In a city where roughly 78 percent of land parcels are not formally registered, a figure Uganda’s Ministry of Lands has returned to repeatedly, it is therefore not strange that “most plausible” is doing an enormous amount of work of assigning ownership to General Saleh.

Consider who actually holds land in Kampala. The Uganda Land Commission administers all public land under Article 239 of the Constitution; every ministry, department, and agency building you pass is, technically, its domain. The Buganda Kingdom’s Mailo system distributes roughly 1,000 square miles, inherited under the 1900 Uganda Agreement and parcelled among some 1,300 individuals and institutions, including churches whose land grants date to the 1870s when missionaries arrived bearing the gun and the Bible. The Anglican Church alone has recently registered nearly 4,000 titles across the country. KCCA holds city council properties. The Catholic Church, private developers, old Asian-return investors, and various government parastatals account for the rest. This is before we enter the enormous grey zone of contested Mailo tenancies, informal settlements, and customary claims that have never been mapped.

But because data between KCCA and the Ministry of Lands remains fragmented, and there are different definitions and misaligned update cycles, what an ordinary Kampalan can actually access is not a registry. It is a fog. And in the fog, the imagination performs governance.

General Saleh is not the figure this story requires. His life project is Operation Wealth Creation. He is a distributionist under a philosophy he himself calls “humanomics”, economics centred on the household, not the portfolio.

At a national land policy workshop in Kapeeka as recently as January 2026, he was demanding accountability from the very ministry whose records are now imagined to carry his name on every title deed. In 2001, President Museveni instructed him to sell assets to clear personal debts from cooperative investment. A man told to liquidate by his own brother is not, by any geometry, secretly acquiring the capital city. None of this will matter, however, until the fog itself is cleared. Clearing it requires something far more uncomfortable than blaming one army general.

In June 2024, 214 homes were demolished in the Lubigi wetland. An elderly woman named Rose Namuddu returned to the rubble of hers and was jailed for two months. Her crime was grief, which the law misread as defiance. Meanwhile, factories in Bwaise, fuel stations in Nansana, and luxury apartments in Wakiso, also on wetlands, also illegal on paper, are sometimes left untouched, shielded by Section 55 of the National Environment Act, which permits structures meeting “sustainable development criteria” to remain. In practice, the translation is simple. It is, Wetland for the well-connected is a development opportunity; for the poor, it is a crime scene. The law has a class accent, and it is not working-class.

One political theorist, James Scott once described the weapons of the weak, such as rumour, misattribution, as tools available to those whom formal institutions have abandoned. Now, it seems like TikTok is the twenty-first century’s most efficient delivery mechanism for that ancient protest. In some of our local dialects, the saying goes: the man with the large head cannot dodge the stone; this is not a mere proverb, it is sociology. When the institutions fail ordinary people, the large heads become targets, not because they are necessarily guilty, but because they are perceived to represent the system that is.

The solution, therefore, is not to rehabilitate “Saleh’s” name through an argument of whether it is “For Sale” or “Not For Sale.” It is to drain the fog. The Uganda Land Commission’s nationwide land digitisation exercise, launched in January 2026, must be accelerated and published openly, parcel by parcel, searchable by phone, available to any Ugandan with a data bundle. KCCA and the Ministry of Lands must replace ad hoc coordination with systematic, legally mandated data integration. NEMA too must publish a full public register of every wetland enforcement action, demolitions and exemptions alike, including names, and tenure status. Regulatory discretion should face scrutiny rather than a shadow.

As my final modest proposal, perhaps the General should simply rename himself General Not-For-Sale. It would save the country a great deal of confusion. More seriously, the General has repeatedly called for transparency regarding ownership of land and property in Kampala. Let us take him up on the offer. Publish a complete, searchable and publicly accessible land registry. Let every citizen know who owns what. Let facts do the work that rumours are currently doing. Until then, General Saleh remains trapped in a uniquely Ugandan paradox. If a building is for sale, it must be for Saleh. If it is not for sale, it is probably still for Saleh. If nobody knows who owns it, it is definitely for Saleh. That is a remarkably heavy burden to place on one man whose only provable crime is bearing a name that sort of rhymes with a transaction.

******

Crispin Kaheru, Member, Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC)