A 68-year-old woman finds herself without a burial ground after all her land was allegedly grabbed by lawyers she had hired to protect it from being grabbed by President Yoweri Museveni!
Immaculate Nakawooya Mutumba’s sorry plight is contained in a lengthy SOS appeal which she has made to the President to help her wrestle her land from the lawyers whom she says have boxed her into a complex web of high-level mafia-style land grabbing in Uganda.
BACKGROUND:
In her letter dated April 7, 2025, Nakawooya who has stayed in the USA for 45 years now, says that starting from 1992 to 2016, she has been investing in real estate back home in a bid to establish a firm fallback property base to cater for her medical and other bills in old age. These properties included land at Kigo and 3.69 Acres of land at Kakoola Village in Mutungo, Wakiso district.
Today however, all her efforts are at a risk of going down the train, thanks to a clique of lawyers whom she had hired to protect it from government’s ‘ill intentions’ against its own citizens.
Nakawooya narrates that at the start of her kyeyo, life was moving exactly as she planned it.
However, her goose was cooked when she hired Lwere, Lwanyaga & Company Advocates to represent her commercial interests during her land and other business transactions in a couple of court cases. These included; Nakawooya vs Kekibina (case no. 173 of 2018 at Entebbe Court) in March 2018, Kekibina vs Nakawooya (High Court appeal case no. 180 of 2019 at Kampala Business Division in March 2019) and Ssejinya caveat/land sale transactions of May 15, 2019. And particularly around September 2021, she literally hugged trouble when she retained a one Counsel Samuel Ocitti from the same law firm and added her the responsibility to manage and protect her estate.
The Start Gets Rosy
According to Nakawooya, for the first 4 years of their working relationship, Mr. Ocitti executed his duties with utmost due care, earning her trust to the point of the two becoming “mother and son”. “From our WhatsApp chats, he called me “mama” and I referred to him as ‘my Gulu son I never had’,” she says. She adds that this new bond saw her become supportive of her son’s career ambitions to become a judge and hence assisted him with tuition for his Law Master’s degree. “I applauded his honors degree and his 2023 Judgeship consideration,” she says.
Nakawooya increasingly got so personal with Ocitti that, between March 2018-July 2022, she paid him over Shs200m which he, among other thing, used to settle loans for 3 sons’ fees, two divorce settlements, build his mum a house in Gulu, start a beverages business for his brother in Gulu and also buy a laptop and Iphones plus covid treatment bills.
M7 Trick Spoils Everything
Nakawooya narrates that their cordial ties developed a crack when, in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, Ocitti and his partner warned her of threats to her estate in Uganda; arising from a looming President’s ploy to grab prime land, aided by city tycoon Hamis Kiggudu.
The lawyers curtly told her that Ham through the President was mooting a deadly Land Confiscation Bill which would see the government seize all the Kabaka’s land in Kigo area and stretch all the way to Mutungo, where she had land.
“Mr. Ocitti alerted me that the land confiscation bill was intended to target me and others in the diaspora without Uganda national IDs,” she says in her letter to the president.
Nakawooya Jumps Into Land Grabbers Web
With such terrible news, Nakawooya panicked and asked how she could protect her land from getting confiscated yet she couldn’t travel to Uganda to get a national ID since it was Covid lockdown. It is then that Ocitti, purportedly after further consultations with his bosses, suggested she opens up a company to which she could transfer all her estate for proper management when she comes back home to secure a national ID after the Covid lockdown.
In September 2021, Nakawooya and the lawyers including Moses Lwanyaga, Abdul Swabur Marzuq, Damalie Nakiranda-Kalenge, and Ocitti, held a Zoom meeting where they asked her for Shs1.85m to open the company for her.
At this stage, however, a forgery occurred when, after these lawyers signing and attaching their licenses, they forged Nakawooya’s signature on the minutes and resolutions which they presented to the Uganda registration services bureau to open up Organic Empire U Ltd.
Nakawooya would also later learn that she got a raw deal when it emerged that Ocitti was allotted 80% shares ‘her’ company.
Using this company, the lawyers “executed fraudulent sales agreements; illegally removed my caveats, signed and filed transfer forms”. Nakawooya also alleges that another illegality occurred when the lawyers as opposed to transferring the entire estate to her company, unlawfully transferred it amongst themselves, including Ocitti, his boss Swabur and his wife Bayiga and also gave some to the company and other third parties including Fred Kaweesi.
For all this betrayal, Nakawooya has since dragged Ocitti to court vide High Court Miscellaneous Application No. 919 of 3023 arising from High Court Civil Suit no. 119 of 2023. However, Nakawooya claims she has so far been frustrated by a seemingly deliberate Ping-Pong from the justice system yet Ocitti and his agents continue to wreak havoc on her estate. This is why she seeks the indulgence of the president who has lately shown a will to deal with notorious land grabbers who were seemingly untouchable in the eyes of the masses— just like Kiboga’s Patrick Ainebyoona — whom he personally arrested for evicting Mzee Badiru Mwanje of Lwankonge Village with disgusting impunity.
This story continues……Watch this space for details on how things got from bad to worse!For comments on this story, call: 0701822301
