Decent housing: How govt abandoned its social contract

Instead of ensuring suitable shelter for its people, Uganda’s government has allowed housing to become a vehicle for exploitation, with a small, wealthy elite enriched through the plunder of public resources now controlling most land and housing either directly or through intermediaries.

Those who wield power commission high-cost residential buildings across Kampala and its suburbs while ordinary citizens face crushing rents, overcrowded slums, and official neglect.

This is the reality of Uganda’s housing crisis – a crisis that demands urgent government action to meet the needs of vulnerable groups and to renew a social contract founded on human dignity. Housing is a fundamental human right.

A home is more than shelter; it is the foundation for health, education, and prosperity, and every Ugandan should have the right to a place they call home. Today, millions live in inadequate or unaffordable housing, with over 60 per cent of urban dwellers residing in informal settlements and rural areas suffering from poorly-built, substandard homes.

It is still possible for the government to consider a thorough strategy aimed at offering free housing to individuals in need, thereby ensuring dignity, security, and enhanced living conditions for low-income families, orphans, widows, and displaced individuals.

When Uganda gained independence in 1962, it inherited a network of colonial-era public housing estates; the British had built segregated housing for different racial and class groups, with Europeans in elite neighbourhoods such as Kololo and Nakasero enjoying large bungalows on expansive plots, Asians in middle-class areas like Old Kampala and Jinja’s Main Street, and Africans in high density, low-cost estates such as Nakawa built in the 1950s for African civil servants and the modernist, subsidised Naguru Flats.

The Bukoto Flats targeted middle-class Ugandans, including teachers and clerks with rent subsidies keeping costs low for civil servants. After independence, the government continued to subsidise housing programs, building estates like Kiwatule for middle- income earners and maintaining military housing in Mbuya and Jinja.

However, the 1972 expulsion of Asians under Idi Amin disrupted rental markets and government housing stock deteriorated under mismanagement. By the 1980s and 1990s, the economic decline and political instability left estates overcrowded, with slums such as Katwe, Kisenyi, and Bwaise growing as formal housing failed, while the National Housing Corporation struggled to maintain properties.

In the 2000s, the NRM government adopted public-private partnerships (PPPs) to redevelop housing, with the Naguru-Nakawa project in the 2010s seeing old flats demolished and handed to Opec Prime Properties for luxury apartments, displacing long-term tenants.

Bukoto Flats were partly privatised, while Kiwatule became a mix of old public housing and new private developments. This shift sparked an affordability crisis as once-subsidised units became inaccessible to most Ugandans, and land disputes intensified, as seen in the Nakawa evictions.

The National Housing and Construction Company Limited (NHCC) retains some properties including Nakawa Housing Estate, parts of Kiwatule, and a few Kololo SSS Flats. However, many units have been sold, redeveloped, or left in disrepair.

Uganda’s government should take lessons from other African countries that have implemented housing programs that are aimed at providing free or subsidised housing.

Examples include Rwanda’s program, Village of Hope (Igirego), where the government has built free housing for genocide survivors, the elderly, and vulnerable families; Namibia, where the government constructs affordable and free housing for low-income earners with some units fully subsidised; Angola’s National Urbanisation and Housing Programme, through which the government has built and distributed free housing to displaced and low-income families especially in Luanda; and South Africa, where the government provides free Reconstruction and Development Programme houses to low-income families, small but decent homes given to qualifying citizens.

Housing priorities must focus on maximizing public land to build homes, creating affordable rental and purchase options in every district, enacting strict anti–land grabbing laws, and introducing deposit protection schemes with stronger penalties for exploitative landlords.

The state should use public land for large-scale social and affordable housing with prices set through a Housing Delivery Agency, using large tenders, economies of scale, and pre-approved planning to drive down costs. Other proposed measures include reforming Uganda’s Housing Act to guarantee free housing.

Certain groups should be prioritised for housing due to their vulnerability and social needs. These include individuals and families facing homelessness, those at risk of violence, people with disabilities, the elderly, female-headed households or single mothers, in some contexts, serving or former members of the armed forces with service-related disabilities, and those displaced by conflicts or natural disasters.

The government ought to consider expanding incremental housing programs with interest-free micro-loans for low- income families, encouraging community cooperatives to pool resources for home construction, upgrading slums through partnerships with NGOs to provide sanitation, water, and durable structures, introducing rent-to-own schemes to transition squatters into ownership, ensuring transparent PPPs for mass housing to avoid corruption, implementing land reform to free land for development, and providing tax incentives for private developers to include low-cost units.

Uganda’s housing crisis reflects a deeper governance failure; one where political power is preserved at the expense of public welfare and reversing this will require a fundamental shift in policy and a renewed social contract that recognises housing as a cornerstone of human dignity.

The writer is a political analyst.