Battle between landlords and tenants gets nasty

By GRACE NAKATO

Despite the “pay before you sleep” policy on rent, defaulting is the norm with many tenants vanishing in the wee hours of the night when they have over-stayed their welcome.

The landlord may own the property, but he has no rights to it. The Tenant’s Act is clear: A seven-year jail sentence for anyone who attempts to evict, evicts or participates in the eviction of tenants. The landlord must serve you with notice equivalent to the rate of payment, too, and then wait for you to abscond in the night.

income tax

Factor in the law that was passed to ensure landlords pay income tax but should not pass it on to the tenant (I don’t know who will be enforcing this) and you realise being a landlord isn’t fun.

Add a touch of banking tricks that ensure they never seem to pay off their mortgage because the bank does not encourage reading of the fine print on loan agreements and you realise why landlords get ulcers. The interest rates keep fluctuating and escalating upwards, and with every payment, the amount due remains static. Meanwhile, your calculations show that the amount paid in interest alone far exceeds the value of the loan you took. Clearly, after all this, you have a very stressed landlord.

Yet the tenant wonders why the landlord keeps increasing rent yet he doesn’t add value to the property. So he or she starts cooking up tricks to dodge paying bills and rent.

All these stress factors are causing landlords and tenants to go crazy. Moses Isabirye, a landlord in Kamuli town, torched his tenant’s beddings and utensils. He also broke their music systems and beat them for ignoring his eviction notice following rent arrears. When police were called on the scene, he claimed to be possessed by demons and engaged them in a fistfight, forcing them to tie him to a metal post at the police station.

Moses is lucky that his tenant was not Geoffrey Nyakuni from Mukono, who stabbed his landlord multiple times using a kitchen knife and cut off his private parts for evicting him due to a couple of months’ unpaid rent. Geoffrey waylaid his landlord as he came home from the bar at around 2am.

We are not sure what precipitated the attack, as Geoffrey is only 20 years old, and I doubt he had just finished paying school fees for his children.

colonialism

I think the water in Mukono needs to be examined and investigated, as people in that area are very bloodthirsty!

Rumour has it that Mukono Town derives its name from the early days of colonialism, when a mzungu tax collector got his arm chopped off by disgruntled Africans. That incident sparked off a mandatory levy of one shilling per taxpayer to contribute towards the wellbeing of the disabled white man. 

Even today, it seems government is still looking at ways of curbing the simple pleasures of life. As we remembered our martyrs recently and lubricated our throats with various spirits, and filled our bellies with roasted pieces of livestock, the powers that be were lobbying to pass a law that prohibits advertisements for alcoholic beverages.

I just wondered whether they know that those adverts are the closest some people get to see bottled beer.