Four years after the towering Nabukalu tree was felled to make way for the Busega–Mpigi Expressway, many Ugandans are asking an unusual question following President Yoweri Museveni’s dramatic suspension of senior engineers and the Ministry of Works’ Permanent Secretary over alleged corruption on the same project:
Could the sacred tree’s curse have finally caught up with them?
The question is, of course, one of folklore rather than fact.
Yet across social media, trading centres in Mpigi, and conversations along the expressway corridor, memories of the controversial tree have come rushing back after Museveni accused officials of allegedly diverting the road through land in which they had personal interests, triggering fresh compensation claims that helped push the project’s cost from about Shs600 billion to Shs1.3 trillion.
To many, the scandal is eerily ironic.
In 2022, government fought a bitter legal battle over Nabukalu, a tree revered by members of Buganda’s Lugave Clan as an ancestral spiritual site.
Its caretaker, Hussein Katamba, wanted Shs500 million in compensation before it could be removed, insisting the spirits residing there could not simply be uprooted for a highway. Government valuers assessed the land at just Shs4.6 million, and the High Court sided with the government.
What happened next has become part of Uganda’s modern folklore.
As bulldozers moved in to cut down the centuries-old tree, Katamba publicly warned that those responsible would one day regret ignoring the spirits.
“The spirits know what is happening… They might have refused to give me what I asked for, but I know they will one day come before me begging,” he told the Daily Monitor after the ruling. He also warned that “misfortunes” could follow those involved.
At the time, many dismissed the remarks as emotional reactions from a man who had just lost a lengthy court battle.
Few imagined that four years later, the same expressway would become the subject of one of Uganda’s biggest infrastructure corruption investigations.
Now, President Museveni has suspended three senior engineers—Edwin Raymond Kiyaga, Dickens Ahimbisibwe and Patrick Muleme—and ordered Permanent Secretary Waiswa Bageya to step aside pending investigations.
The President alleges officials abandoned the already surveyed and compensated route and instead diverted the road through land linked to their own interests, forcing government to pay fresh compensation and helping inflate the project’s cost to around Shs1.3 trillion.
Whether those allegations are ultimately proven will be determined by investigators.
Whether the Nabukalu spirits had anything to do with the unfolding scandal is a matter of personal belief.
Anthropologists have long observed that in many African societies, major scandals involving places regarded as sacred often revive stories of curses, ancestral displeasure or supernatural justice—not because such claims can be verified, but because communities use them to make sense of events that appear morally consequential.
Perhaps that is why Nabukalu has returned to the national conversation.
To believers, the latest suspensions are more than an anti-corruption operation; they are seen as poetic justice.
To skeptics, they are simply evidence that corruption eventually catches up with those who engage in it.
Either way, the tree that once delayed the Busega–Mpigi Expressway has once again become part of its story—not standing beside the road anymore, but lingering in Uganda’s public imagination.
