Ugandan Indigenous Communities Say Total’s Oil Project Is More of a Land Grab than a Development Opportunity

Diana Taremwa Karakire /Hoima-Uganda

When Jealousy Mugisa Mulimba, a 52-year-old father of nine in Uganda’s oil-rich Buliisa district, was informed he would need to move his family from his ancestral home because French oil giant TotalEnergies needed his three acres to build their central processing facility, he was reasonable. He didn’t put up a fight.He asked that the company give him three acres nearby; somewhere out of the way of the facility, but still near the place he’d always called home, the health facilities he and his family rely upon, and his kids’ schools.

He was instead shown land far away, isolated and distant from everything and everyone he’d ever known. After a five-year legal battle, a Ugandan court expropriated his land anyway in 2023, along with that of 41 other affected people.

“They are inhuman,” he said during a recent interview. “This is my land on which my ancestors are buried. I will not just leave like they want, I will continue fighting.”

Together with other affected people, Mr. Mulimba plans to appeal the decision of the Hoima court in Uganda’s high court.

A resettlement house built by TotalEnergies for project-affected persons PAPS . Some PAPs have expressed concerns that these houses are isolated compared to the communal settings they were accustomed to. Photo by Diana Taremwa-Karakire.

Although the Ugandan government promises that oil projects will lift the country out of poverty , activists are concerned not only about the hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide these projects will generate, but also about the more immediate impacts, the massive displacement of  indigenous communities, bringing them not the promised riches of an oil boom, but sending them ever deeper into poverty.Students, environmental and human rights defenders routinely stage protests outside the French and European Union embassies, their main target: to jettison the planned construction of oil infrastructure, including the world's longest heated oil pipeline across Uganda and Tanzania.

Earnest Rubondo the Executive Director at Petroleum Authority , the state agency in charge of oil development in Uganda says that all issues related to the land acquisition process for oil projects will be resolved.“There’s no need for families to take oil companies to court. Every concern raised by affected people will be addressed,” Rubondo said in an interview

Uganda first discovered commercial quantities of oil nearly 20 years ago, but it wasn’t until TotalEnergies and the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company CNOOC inked a deal to exploit the resources in the Lake Albert region in 2022 that the country’s fossil fuel industry began in earnest. The region, which lies on the country's western border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is estimated to hold over 6.5 billion barrels of oil, with 1.4 billion barrels economically recoverable.

TotalEnergies is the major operator for both the Tilenga oilfields, a $6 billion project covering Buliisa and Nwoya districts near the shores of Lake Albert, and the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP, project that will transport that oil from Uganda to an export port in Tanzania. Other partners are CNOOC and the state-owned Uganda National Oil Company, as well as Tanzania’s state-owned Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation.

A map of Tilenga & EACO projects.Source/ TotalEnergies source:TotalEnergies website

The Tilenga project includes the development of 6 oil fields and the drilling of about 426 wells, with 10 wellpads located inside Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda’s largest national park. A central processing facility capable of processing up to 200,000 barrels of oil per day is also part of the project. Over 110 wells have been drilled so far according to TotalEnergies officials.

Land Grabs and Livelihoods Devastated

The completion of the Tilenga and EACOP projects will require a land acquisition program covering some 6,400 hectares. This means relocating 775 primary residences, and affecting a total of  19,262 landowners, and land users.

TotalEnergies is responsible for overseeing the land acquisition process, including all administrative costs and compensation payments.The company contracted Atacama Consulting, a Ugandan firm, to carry out implementation of this process.

However, activists say the Tilenga project’s land acquisition process has been marked by delayed, inadequate and unfair compensation as well as use of threats, intimidation, and other tactics to coerce many poor families into accepting bad deals for their land. This has led to resistance to the project’s efforts to fence off land in some areas, despite the company’s insistence that it sought consent and is following social safeguards.

“We have been engaging with affected families, assessing their complaints on compensation, and taking action based on our findings. We note the concerns raised and evaluate them carefully,” said Philippe Giroux, General Manager at TotalEnergies EP Uganda in an interview.

Land and property rights in Uganda are safeguarded under Article 26 of the Constitution and the Land Act of 1998 which clearly stipulate that  landowners must give consent before their land is sold or acquired , and compensation is not only for land, but also for developments on the land such as crops, houses, and other property.The land acquisition process for oil projects is guided by government-mandated Land Acquisition Resettlement Framework and Resettlement Action Plans (RAPS) that are part of assessments carried out by TotalEnergies.The Tilenga RAP stipulates that the project will re-establish the livelihoods of affected persons to an equal or greater level than before the project activities.

However, many of the affected people in question, like Mulimba, report unresolved disputes and claim that these projects have left them worse off than before, driving them deeper into poverty.

On December 8, 2023, the High Court in Hoima ruled that 42 households be evicted before compensation to make way for the Tilenga Project. The court allowed TotalEnergies to deposit compensation funds in court and take the land, even by force if needed. While the company made compensation payments after resolving disputes, many affected families still argue that the compensation was inadequate.

“TotalEnergies has failed to respect the rights of local communities. It has failed to gain the informed consent of affected communities for the project as is legally required,” said Benon Tusingwire, the executive director at Navigators of Development Association NAVODA, a local rights group working in the project area. He also noted that officials from Atacama have been coercing and tricking affected people into signing consent forms for the acquisition of their land.

As the deadline for the production of first oil approaches, the actions of both TotalEnergies and government officials have become more aggressive, residents claim.

On the morning of May 13, 2024, Fred Balikenda (pictured in the photo at the top of this story), a local peasant farmer living on the margins of one of TotalEnergies oil wells, suffered one of the most brutal evictions to date. A group of gun-toting policemen in Toyota Pickup trucks bumped into the fenced enclosure of Balikenda’s home and ordered him and his wife out of their 4 bedroom house. As they waited in the yard, the officers, backed by around a dozen un-uniformed men, started demolishing the house.

Balikenda, along with other landowners, including Mulimba, lost the suit in April 2024 in which they had sought to halt their evictions. The Judge in Hoima city, near the oil fields, ruled that money meant for the expropriation compensation should be deposited with the court and that the government could evict locals so that TotalEnergies construction activities could go ahead.

“They threw out some of my belongings through the windows,” Balikenda said, gazing into the distance. “We are now living a life of destitution, we have lost so much land to the project and yet what we were being compensated isn’t equal to what is being taken. We no longer have access to community grazing land, all my cows and pigs have died.”

Even before this eviction, Balikenda was effectively living in an open-air prison for months after TotalEnergies fenced in his home and a 1-acre piece of land that he had refused to vacate before his replacement house was complete. His pigs starved to death because he could no longer get out of the enclosure to get them fodder, he says. Court is yet to rule on their appeal.

“We are really going through some of the roughest times,” Balikenda said.  “Our families are traumatized”

The Petroleum Authority of Uganda,says that recent evictions of Tilenga affected persons followed the due legal process.

“The Tilenga Project prioritizes minimizing disruption to affected communities and ensuring that all project-affected persons are adequately compensated for their losses and inconveniences. Despite the comprehensive compensation and resettlement efforts, the final PAPs’ repeated refusal to relocate necessitated legal action by the government,” says a statement from PAU.

However, lawyers representing Balikenda and others insist that the court process was flawed. In a country where the justice system mostly rules in favor of the government, affected people remain helpless.

“If it were not for the harassment, intimidation, arrests, detentions and other threats that they face, they would never have accepted the low compensation,” said Tusingwire.

A 2023 report by Human Rights Watch indicated that the EACOP project has devastated thousands of livelihoods in Uganda and risks locking in decades of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to the global climate crisis. More than a dozen banks and insurance companies have shunned investment in EACOP, citing environmental and human-rights concerns.

With so many lenders on the sidelines, China has been willing to show support for the project. Last year, Ruth Nankabirwa, the Minister of Energy and Mineral Development, told state media that China would provide more than half of the $3.05 billion in debt financing needed, with smaller lenders taking up the rest of the slack.

Data Box: Uganda’s Oil Land & Livelihood Impact

Estimated oil reserves in Lake Albert region	6.5 billion barrels
Economically recoverable oil	1.4 billion barrels
Tilenga project value	$6 billion
Oil fields under Tilenga	6 fields
Planned wells	426 wells
Wells drilled so far	110+
Project land required (Tilenga + EACOP)	6,400 hectares
Affected landowners and land users	19,262 people
Projected economic boost from oil industry	$40 billion

According to government, the oil industry is projected to bring a $40 billion boost to Uganda’s economy. When production is at its peak, the government will receive an anticipated $2 billion a year in revenue from the development.This fits well into the plans of Uganda’s long-time leader, Yoweri Museveni, who has made development of the $10 billion hydrocarbon industry a cornerstone of his plan to transform this impoverished East African nation.

But not everyone agrees on what constitutes “betterment” and for which people. In an interview, Dickens Kamugisha, the Chief Executive Officer of Africa Institute for Energy Governance, contends that the Ugandan government appears bent on maximizing proceeds from the industry without regard for Indigenous communities and the environment.

“The longer we wait to reduce emissions, the greater our collective suffering will be,” said Mr. Kamugisha , who spent weeks in detention in 2021 over charges related to his environmental advocacy work around EACOP “We must reduce and eventually eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels if we are serious about halting global warming.”

 

Laying of  (PS1) of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline  project in Hoima district ,Uganda. It's a critical part of the EACOP infrastructure, receiving crude oil from feeder pipelines from the Tilenga oil fields and transporting it to port Tanga in Tanzania. Photo by Diana Taremwa Karakire

The Pattern Continues in Mozambique

More than 2000 kilometers to the south, TotalEnergies’ $20 billion natural gas project in northern Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province was saved in 2021 by a well-timed donation from France to Rwanda, which was followed just a few weeks later by the deployment of some 2,500 Rwandan peace-keeping troops to fight Jihadist fighters in the region. The deployment happened months after TotalEnergies had declared force majeure on the project due to an offensive by Islamic State-linked insurgents.

The insurgency, which has been raging since 2017, is mainly spearheaded by angry young men who resent security force abuses and believe elites monopolize the region’s natural resources while local communities starve. As in Uganda, the company’s approach to land acquisition and community outreach has not served to quell that anger; relocation efforts have often resulted in the displacement of communities far from their traditional and familial roots, with farmers being moved to non-arable land or fishermen to new villages far from the sea.

Critics of the gas project argue that while the insurgency is rooted in Cabo Delgado’s complex political and religious history, so far Total’s operations follow a familiar pattern of extracting wealth from the province with little benefit to local residents.

TotalEnergies has been forced to shore up more security measures, signing a security pact contracting Isco Segurança, a security company backed by  Rwanda’s ruling party, to secure the gas fields. But analysts believe that such security arrangements will not leave a lasting solution since the grievances are felt deeply by large sections of the region’s impoverished population.

According to the International Crisis Group, the insurgents are fighting for a “meaningful role in the Cabo Delgado economy, so they can benefit from the opportunities created by major mining and gas projects.”