Stories
Daisy Hope Ejang grew up with her mother and seven siblings in a public bathroom, the same bathroom she was born in, in Naguru estate, which was a slum of Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. She told New Vision, a newspaper:
“During the day, we had nowhere to stay. In the evening, mother cleaned up the cubicle and we slept. We would wake up very early the following day to clear up the place before people came to shower.”
Then one morning in July of 2011, bulldozers showed up. The bathroom was razed to the ground, along with the rest of the Naguru estate. “This was too much. I had not seen this coming,” Ejang said.
Ejang’s is one of the 1,750 families evicted from their homes in the Naguru estate. The land was being developed by Opec Prime Properties, a company backed by the Irish property developers the Comer brothers.
Their €250 million scheme centred on a very big, flattish, rounded, glassy blob, with a severe-looking tower protruding from one end of it. It was to be surrounded by parklands and apartment blocks. 5,000 homes were to be built in total. The Naguru estate families were to be offered new homes there.
That was July 2011. In October of this year, after years of rows and litigation between the Ugandan government and the Comer brothers, the project was officially shelved.
Opec Prime Properties says it’s out $47 million; the Ugandan Government alleges breach of contract; and the 1,750 families of the Naguru estate are scattered to the winds.
The project was advanced by a meeting, arranged by world heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis, between the Comer Brothers and Uganda’s long-sitting president Yoweri Museveni.
The Ugandan Government had offered the estate to Opec Prime Properties for $10 per year on a 99-year lease, if it agreed to develop it. The estate had been set up by the colonial British government in the 1950s and had grown dilapidated.
According to terms of the deal, Opec Prime Properties would take on the risks associated with financing and construction. Evicted tenants were to be given priority access to the new housing units. The deal was originally signed in 2007 and was conditional on construction starting within four years.
According to Frederic Musisi, a journalist with the Daily Monitor newspaper in Uganda, the project was unprecedented in scale: “The Comers, along with their local partners, come along promising something big. Something we’d never seen before – a satellite city, with condos and mansions.”
Almost immediately, the problems started. The Ugandan inspector general, an anti-corruption body, said the contract was awarded “because of massive collusion, gross irregularities and illegalities, corruption and abuse of authority of public office”. The report also says three Ugandan government ministers “lied and misled” over the terms of the deal – though to be clear, there’s nothing to suggest the Comers did anything wrong here.
The Comers had the president’s backing: “Why should an investor suffer for the mistakes of an official?”, he said. Four years later, in 2014, Brian Comer did the rounds in Uganda with government officials and convinced them to give the scheme final approval. Around this time, star architect David Adjaye was brought in. Out went the glassy blob, in its place went ten conical towers.
2014 turned out to be the high point. By 2017 there was still no progress. The government was accused of giving away a parcel of the site without the Comers’ agreement. The only completed work was the destruction of the 1,750 families’ homes in 2011.
“There was something amiss.”
Frederick Musisi says the scheme was unrealistic from the outset. “They wanted to construct a project never seen before in Uganda… but there was something amiss. Anyone who lived in this town could tell you, it wasn’t going to happen.” The project got as far as it did, he says, because high-profile businessmen lent it credibility:
“Once you have a few officials, big lawyers in town behind the project, and big names chair the boards of a special purpose vehicle which had been established. All these big shots were involved, so people took the project seriously. Then, when reality set in, one by one, people started disappearing.”
Now that the thing has broken down, Opec Prime Properties is seeking $47 million in damages from the Ugandan Government. They’re taking the case to the Ugandan courts. Their original connection, President Museveni, is still in power.
As an outsider, it’s hard to do business in Africa. There’s not a lot of foreign investment in sub-Saharan Africa because, among other things, corruption is a big problem. Elizabeth Asiedu of the University of Kansas has studied how corruption affects investment. As you’d expect, she found African countries with more resources attract more foreign investment. But she also found that corruption matters a lot:
“A benchmark specification shows that a decline in corruption from the level of Nigeria to that of South Africa has the same positive effect on foreign direct investment as increasing the share of fuels and minerals in total exports by about 34 per cent.”
Cian Clohessy is an Irish contractor who’s worked in Gabon, in central Africa. He says of it, “It wouldn’t be a place to go if you’re naive, or haven’t done your homework first. I’ll put it that way.”
The aftermath
According to New Vision, the original 1,750 families of Nakawa-Naguru are said to have gone back to their ancestral homes in the countryside, or spread out around the slums of Kampala. Some are known to have built a settlement nearby, where “timber, mud, rusted iron sheet and wattle shacks flank the railway line for two kilometres.” Frederic Musisi says, “The whole housing issue around Kampala became terrible after those evictions.”
In 2017, the former residents started to sue the government, saying they didn’t get the homes they were promised. In return, they’ve been offered 25 per cent of the cost of a modest two-bed house. The case still isn’t settled.
As for the land itself, part of it has been given over by the government for the construction of a hospital. According to New Vision, “over 80 plots of land have since been parcelled out for individuals, and at least 13 of the beneficiaries have already started erecting mansions”
Who’s to blame? David Mpanga, a lawyer representing Opec Prime Properties, says “as far as the developer is concerned, the project was delayed 100 per cent by government. The interruptions were done by government since 2007”.
Musisi says, “For me, the bottom line is, government got carried away by excitement of something big; I am not even sure a feasibility study, if there was ever one, was studied to the last detail. It wasn’t until reality set in that everyone started asking the critical questions that should’ve come first.”
The Comers, whose Irish property portfolio is estimated to be worth €2 billion, have moved on. Luke Comer said of the Ugandan project “The main problem was the difficulty local people had in obtaining mortgages. Who’s going to give them mortgages? Africa is not a great prospect in that way.”
