Renowned events organizer Isaac Mulindwa has accused a ‘mafia clique’ led by a one Matthew Bakyawa of masterminding an assault on him over a disagreement on the ownership of a piece of land in upscale Makindye division.
Speaking to The Observer, Mulindwa said his contention with Bakyawa and his group stems from a disagreement over a piece of land located on Block 273, Plot 5644 Kyadondo at Kyamula in Upper Kkonge.
Mulindwa says he bought the land in 2010 from Equatorial Real Estate Ltd and since then, he has never developed it but has contracted two overseers who reside nearby. On February 23, while he was in South Africa, he got information from one of the overseers that some people had brought building materials and had started constructing on the land.
Mulindwa says he asked his relative Salim Nyonyintono to go and report the case at the Kabalagala police station, where he was given two police officers to escort him to the plot. On arriving at the plot, they found builders constructing a store and asked them to call their boss, which they did.
Shortly after, a man who identified himself as Matthew Bakyawa arrived with two counterterrorism police officers. Bakyawa informed Nyonyintono and the police officers that he was working under the instructions of Sodo Kaguta, who had recently purchased the land.
Sodo is remembered famously for standing against former Foreign Affairs minister Sam Kutesa’s daughter Shartsi Musherure for the Mawogola North MP seat. Police asked Bakyawa to stop the construction and produce his land documents to the police lands office at Kabalagala police station the following day.
Mulindwa reached out to Sodo’s brother, Nzeire Kaguta, and ex- plained the situation to him, as well as sending him a copy of his land title. He asked Nzeire to get in touch with Sodo so that they can iron out their differences.
On March 13, Mulindwa got Sodo’s number to seek an explanation why he was building on his land.
“Sodo told me that he had been lied to and that the land was in a kibanja without land titles. He informed me that he had instructed his workers to officially vacate the land since it had five separate plots, each with its own land title and an owner already,” Mulindwa says.
After returning to Uganda, Mulindwa visited the land on March 14 to see if the people had vacated. To his surprise, instead of finding only the small store, which he knew had been erected and completed, he found that they had also erected another small house, which was almost completed, and there was a woman with children.
He then informed Sodo that the people he had instructed to vacate his land were still there and that construction was still ongoing. Sodo advised him to ask the police to evict them. He informed the builders of what Sodo had told him and asked them to leave.
The following day he went back to check whether they had left, to his surprise, he was attacked and assaulted by a panga- welding gang led by a one Simeo.
“One approached me and inquired who I was and what I wanted. As I started to answer him, I realized that I could no longer see the second man who had been approaching me from my right side. That’s when the big guy hit me in the neck with the handle of the panga. I fell down and the attack continued with the hitting and kicking. Luckily for me, a blow struck my hand with my phone, which caused the phone to fly off. Thank God, the attacker stopped as he ran to pick up the phone; this gave me time to get up and run for my life,” Mulindwa says.
He ran to the Konge police post, which is a few minutes away. He narrated his ordeal, and the police gave him escorts to pick up his car, which they found vandalized. Police apprehended one man who was found trying to deflate his car. But before they could leave the scene, Bakyawa arrived with Simeo with the gang also wielding pangas threatening to kill them.
“Bakyawa put down his panga, approached me calmly, and asked me if I was the one who had called him the previous day, to which I answered yes. At which time he started apologizing to me for what had happened to me and telling me that I should never have come to my own land since I could have been killed by the panga-armed gang. He then asked me to get into my car and leave. He then told me that we meet tomorrow at the Kkonge police post and sort this matter out without
the rest of the panga-armed gang members around, which I agreed to,” Mulindwa says.
However, Bakyawa did not turn up and went into hiding. After that, Mulindwa said his focus changed to getting security entities to effect an arrest of the panga-armed gang, which was still walking freely on his land without fear.
On March 21, four days after Mulindwa had been attacked, severely beaten and cut by the gang, and through the efforts of various security entities, four of the armed gang members were arrested from the site of the attack. Simeo, the one in command of the panga-armed gang, was also arrested by the Kampala Metropolitan Police.
However, to date, the overall leader Bakyawa is still at large. Efforts to speak to Sodo were futile as he didn’t pick up or return our calls or messages on his known number.
Source: The Observer
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