Ugandan tycoon Amos Nzeyi is still farming land he sold to the state pension fund in 2008

Members of Uganda's Parliament walked onto land at Temangalo this week that the National Social Security Fund bought eighteen years ago and found cattle grazing on it.

The Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises inspected the site in Wakiso District on Wednesday and resolved to summon Amos Nzeyi, the businessman who sold it, to appear next week and explain why he has not handed over 55 acres of the 463.87 he sold the fund in 2008.

"Grazing cattle and farms were observable on the land," said Muwada Nkunyinyi, who chairs the committee.

NSSF paid Shs11 billion for the property, working out at Shs24 million an acre, buying from Nzeyi and Arma Ltd, a company associated with the former prime minister Amama Mbabazi. The fund holds the titles. It has never taken possession of the disputed portion.

Isaac Ogwang, NSSF's senior manager for enforcement and litigation, told the committee the fund is now going to court. It issued Nzeyi an eviction notice on June 15 giving him until the end of that month, and the deadline passed without the land being surrendered.

"We have to get a court order for the eviction and the process has started," Ogwang said.

Patrick Michael Ayota, the fund's managing director, attributed the delay to litigation. Talks on a land swap collapsed before the eviction notice was issued. Gerald Kasaato, the deputy managing director, told the committee in February that the continuing court action stemmed from Nzeyi's request to exchange 30 acres of Temangalo for another parcel elsewhere, a proposal that drew sharp questions from legislators.

"He is the same person that sold us that land, then he wants a swap," said Juliet Kinyamatama, the Rakai Woman MP.

The inspection followed a query raised in the Auditor General's 2023 value-for-money report. NSSF has earmarked the site for a mixed-use affordable housing scheme combining residential units with commercial and social infrastructure, and committee members used the visit to raise concerns about room sizes, design and construction quality on the proposed development.

The 2008 purchase produced one of the most damaging political controversies of that decade in Uganda. Parliament investigated the valuation and the procurement process, and the affair became known simply as Temangalo, with Mbabazi's involvement placing it at the centre of national politics.

A second dispute followed. Temangalo Tea Estate, a company owned by the family of Muhammad Hassanali Moosa, sued NSSF and Nzeyi in 2016, claiming the land had belonged to it under a 79-year lease dating from September 1924 before Idi Amin expelled Uganda's Asian population in 1972. Justice John Eudes Keitirima of the High Court's Land Division dismissed that case with costs in September 2020, ruling it was barred by limitation because the family had waited 23 years to bring it. Nazim Moosa had told an earlier parliamentary committee that the land was fraudulently transferred to Nzeyi.

Nzeyi built the business behind him from a childhood without school fees.

Born in Kabale in December 1947, he sold eggs as a primary school pupil, and his father worked at the White Horse Inn, a hotel Nzeyi later bought. He started in timber and transport in the mid-1960s, supplying large infrastructure projects, and had his trucks seized briefly by Amin's military in 1972. He won Amin's 6,000-kilometre Organisation of African Unity rally in 1976 driving Datsuns, was detained and beaten by the regime's secret police afterwards, and fled to Kenya, where he founded Intercontinental Transport Company Ltd and ran a fleet that peaked above 250 trucks.

He returned after the National Resistance Movement took power in 1986 and opened Hot Loaf Bakery, one of the first large bread producers in the country. A crown cork plant followed in the late 1980s, supplying beverage companies across East Africa, and Nzeyi then bid for the Lake Victoria Bottling Company alongside Dan Kigozi and Chris Kayoboke, converting it into Uganda's PepsiCo franchise.

Crown Beverages sold 51 percent to International Pepsi Cola Bottling Investments of South Africa in 1997 before Ugandan shareholders bought the company back outright in October 2001. Nzeyi holds 51 percent and serves as executive chairman. Production rose from 18 million cartons to more than 65 million under his tenure, and the company reported turnover of Shs400 billion and profit of Shs35 billion in 2020. Shareholders including Nzeyi contributed $26 million of their own money on top of a $50 million bank facility to build a new $76 million plant.

He also has form in banking. Nzeyi joined Mbabazi, Ruhakana Rugunda and Ezra Suruma to found Kigezi Bank of Commerce in 1991, which became the National Bank of Commerce, and held 40 percent of it until the Bank of Uganda closed the lender and Crane Bank took over its assets. He ran Innscor Uganda from January 1999 to December 2016, operating the Chicken Royale and Pizza Royale chains, and owns the Palm Valley Golf and Country Club at Bwabejja. He has served as Mauritius's honorary consul in Kampala since 2018.

President Yoweri Museveni praised him in December as a genuine indigenous investor who had created jobs and helped transform the economy, in remarks delivered by Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa at a thanksgiving ceremony in Kabale.

No credible published valuation of Nzeyi's wealth exists. Crown Beverages is private, and neither Forbes nor Bloomberg tracks him.