Olive Kigongo has lost her bid to force the sale of a Kololo home she co-owns with her former husband, Moses Kigongo, the National Resistance Movement’s first national vice chairperson.
Dismissing the case, Justice Elizabeth Jane Alividza said the sale would interfere with a pending appeal between the two.
The property is Plot 29 Kololo Hill Drive in Kampala. Olive and Kigongo lived together as husband and wife on the land for twenty-six years.
Then the relationship broke down, and Kigongo left the property.
In 2015, he went to the High Court seeking to evict Olive from the property.
Olive fought back and filed a defence and a counterclaim, asking the court to protect her interest in a property that was not registered at the time in her name. She also wanted to be registered on the certificate of title as a co-owner.
On April 27, 2017, the court dismissed Kigongo’s case ‘for lack of merit’ and ruled in Olive’s favour.
The court said that the house was not matrimonial property, meaning property the couple owned as a married pair.
But it held that Olive still had a stake in it under a doctrine called proprietary estoppel.
The court ordered the Commissioner for Land Registration to register the house in both their names as tenants in common, in equal shares. Tenants in common each own a share of the same property, and neither can claim the whole.
It also issued a permanent injunction, stopping Kigongo from evicting Olive.
The certificate of title of the property shows the two were registered as tenants in common on June 2, 2023, meaning they equally hold shares in the house.
However, Kigongo appealed the decision in the Court of Appeal and Olive filed a cross-appeal on April 16, 2025. Both appeals are still waiting for judgment.
While they wait, Olive returned to court with a fresh application, seeking to have the house sold through a competitive open bid and for the money to be shared equally. She also asked for costs.
Her main complaint was that the two could no longer work together. She said they “can no longer communicate and cooperate” on managing, using and maintaining the property.
She said the house now stood ‘at risk of going to waste to the detriment of both parties’.
Olive’s lawyers from KBW Advocates argued that her undivided share left her stuck. They said she could not claim the property, repair it, pay ground rent and Kampala Capital City Authority rates, or rent it out.
They said the practical answer was for the court to end the co-ownership through a sale.
But Kigongo was represented by Muwema & Co. Advocates, who said the 2015 injunction still stopped him from selling, mortgaging or leasing the house.
He also argued that the application was barred by res judicata, a rule that stops people from taking the same fight to court twice, describing the application as a review of the 2017 judgment ‘in disguise’.
Olive’s lawyers answered that no injunction stopped Kigongo from dealing with the property to her harm. They argued that the court meant to protect her interest from his “unlawful dealings”.
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After hearing the arguments, Justice Alividza said the permanent injunction granted by the court in 2017 was intended to protect the interest of Olive.
She added that once Olive was registered as a tenant in common, the intended purpose of the permanent injunction was achieved.
Justice Alividza also rejected Kigongo’s res judicata argument. She quoted Section 7 of the Civil Procedure Act and Court of Appeal decisions on the doctrine. One of them says justice demands “there must be an end of litigation”.
She also accepted a basic point of land law, noting that “termination of tenancy in common can be by sale or by partition of the common land”, and that a sale “ensures that the proceeds are distributed amongst the co-owners”.
So in effect, Olive’s idea of ending the co-ownership was legally sound, but what sank her application was the appeal.
Justice Alividza said she had checked the court’s electronic case system, ECCMIS, and it showed that in his memorandum of appeal, Kigongo is still challenging Olive’s ownership of the suit land. It also showed Olive’s cross-appeal.
“It is my finding that severing the suit property terminates the tenancy in common, which in turn would affect the determination of the pending appeal,” she ruled.
“Therefore, this cause is dismissed.”
