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AG okays disclosure of oil agreements amidst international pressure

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The oil companies expressed no objection to disclosing the agreements.

The Attorney General, Kiryowa Kiwanuka, has given the Ugandan government a green light to disclose the international oil contracts to the public.

This comes after the oil companies said they have no objections to publicising the oil contracts. Kiwanuka’s advice is likely to be welcomed by civil society and Ugandan citizens who have long called for transparency in the oil and mining sectors. Kiwanuka, in a letter dated July 2, 2024, advised the minister of Finance, Matia Kasaija that he was at liberty to disclose the production sharing agreements (PSAs) if he deemed it appropriate.

In a letter dated July 2, 2024, Kiwanuka advised Finance minister Matia Kasaija that he may disclose the production sharing agreements (PSAs) if he deems it appropriate. This guidance was in response to a letter from Kasaija dated June 1, 2024. However, Kiwanuka’s advice specifically pertains only to contracts with TotalEnergies Uganda and CNOOC Uganda Limited. He cited letters from these companies, dated July 18, 2021, and November 29, 2021, respectively, which confirmed their consent to the disclosure of their PSAs to fulfil the requirements of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) standard 2.4.

“Therefore, we advise that should you deem it appropriate you are at liberty to disclose the PSAs as prescribed by the EITI standard requirement,” reads the letter copied to the minister of Energy and Mineral Development, state minister for Minerals, deputy attorney general.

The letter was also copied to the permanent secretary/secretary to the treasury, ministry of Finance, permanent secretary ministry of Energy, solicitor general and deputy solicitor general. A member of the civil society who had seen the letter however said it was silent concerning the contracts signed with other companies involved in oil exploration in the Albertine area.

Some of those include DGR Energy Turaco Uganda SMC Limited which is a unit of Australia’s DGR Global and state-owned Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) and Nigeria’s Oranto. From Kiwanuka’s advice, it appears that the contracts signed with UNOC and mining contracts will remain a secret.

Uganda has been a member of the EITI since August 2020, committing to contract transparency by publicly disclosing the full text of agreements governing the exploitation of oil, gas, and mineral resources. By joining the EITI, Uganda aimed to enhance transparency, strengthen tax collection, promote public debate, improve the investment climate, and create lasting value from its petroleum and mineral resources.

This week, EITI executive director Mark Robinson visited Uganda to assess the country’s progress in ensuring transparency in the oil, gas, and minerals sectors. Robinson was accompanied by Suneeta Kaimal, president and CEO of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), which has been instrumental in building the capacity of Ugandan civil society, media, parliamentarians, and government ministries on natural resource governance.

EITI executive director Nark Robinson
EITI executive director Nark Robinson

NRGI has supported capacity building of Ugandan civil society, media, parliamentarians, and ministries on natural resources governance, especially in accountability and governance. Robinson and Kaimal on Thursday met the minister of Finance, Matia Kasaijja, and his officers and discussed the progress in ensuring public disclosure of contracts under the extractive sector.

He also met officers from the Attorney General’s office and the key industry players like TotalEnergies and members of the civil society under multi-stakeholder groups (MSGs) hosted at the Uganda EITI secretariat under the ministry of Finance.  Robinson told journalists that his team found it so striking that all the stakeholders in Uganda were committed to the EITI process.

”The EITI seemed to have curved out open space in Uganda for genuine, free, and open debate on these complex issues around the extractive industry,” he said.

RObison’s visit to Uganda follows the validation report on Uganda whose results were released in May 2024. The EITI board said Uganda had achieved a moderate score in implementing the 2019 EITI Standard at 78.5 points. The overall score reflects an average of the three component scores on stakeholder engagement, transparency, and outcomes and impact. On the transparency component, Uganda achieved a fairly low score of 67.5 points. Robinson while meeting the minister raised some of these issues.

“We identified some of the improvements that could be made. He was very receptive. For example, how can contracts further be made open to the public? So there is a process to move towards that goal,” he said.

He confirmed that they discussed making public the audited accounts of Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC).

“He was very receptive to that idea. So I was very struck by their receptivity and recognition from the government to respond positively to some of the recommendations,” added Robinson.

Sources who attended the meeting with the minister said he asked his visitors about what Uganda would gain from its participation with EITI. Robinson said the minister’s question was good because it reconfirmed why Uganda signed up to the EITI. The EITI board had reported that there had been little progress on full disclosures of contracts in the oil sector despite Uganda EITI’s (UGEITI) efforts.

The EITI board also noted that beneficial ownership data was not available though there had been reforms put to create a national beneficial ownership registry. Robinson seemed to have had information to the effect that TotalEnergies and CNOOC Uganda had written no objection letters to the disclosure of the PSAs signed with the government of Uganda.

“Uganda has to demonstrate real progress on making the contracts public. That needs to happen not just those two but across the sector,” he said.

Robinson emphasized the need for Uganda to demonstrate real progress in making contracts public across the entire sector, not just with TotalEnergies and CNOOC. He also called for the creation of a public registry of beneficial owners in the oil, gas, and mining sectors and the reconciliation of discrepancies in gold production data.

“The fourth one is to reconcile some of the discrepancies in the mining data, especially gold production,” added Robison.

Asked why they were insistent on gold data, he said, “It is so important in many countries. And it is one of your major minerals in Uganda that has significant and considerable revenue. That is why gold matters so much than other sectors of the mining,” he said.

Gold, one of Uganda’s major minerals, has been a focal point due to its significant revenue potential. A recent UN report highlighted Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi as key transit routes for gold smuggled from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to Dubai. In Uganda, discrepancies have been noted between gold production figures reported by the Bank of Uganda and those declared by Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) customs.

David Sserwadda, a senior mining inspector, and a member of the Uganda EITI Multisector Group said there is an effort to ensure that different agencies of the government don’t regulate gold exports. He revealed that there had been a meeting with the customs department on how to align gold export in the sense that when it is not cleared, the customs should not allow the export. Uganda has to close some of those before the next EITI board validation commencing on July 1, 2026.

Source: The Observer

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Forced Land Evictions in Uganda: Tenure and food insecurity on the rise…

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3 days ago

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November 20, 2024

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The scale of the issue, as revealed in Witness Radio’s recent report, is staggering and demands immediate attention: Over 5,000 hectares are targeted weekly by local and foreign investors, leading to the displacement of hundreds of Indigenous and local communities. This urgent situation threatens their food sovereignty and environmental stewardship, necessitating immediate and decisive action.

The forced land evictions are not just numbers; they are exacerbating inequality and directly undermining the efforts of local farmers to safeguard food systems and the environment.

Disturbing findings from the Daily Monitor: Uganda is grappling with a surge in malnutrition cases, with over 260,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition, as reported by UNICEF and WHO.

When evicted from their land, which is the source of livelihood, survival becomes very difficult, resulting in unwanted deaths, sicknesses, and poverty. These are not just statistics, but the harsh realities the affected communities face. It’s crucial to remember that there’s a human story of struggle and loss behind every statistic, and it’s these stories that should drive our actions.

Witness Radio’s recent report, which covered the first half of 2024, revealed that Ugandans face forced land evictions daily to give way to land-based investments, with 723 hectares of land at risk of being grabbed daily.

Furthermore, over 360,000 Ugandans were displaced, with a daily average of 2,160 people losing their livelihood. Land is targeted for oil and gas extraction, mining, agribusiness, and tree plantations for carbon offsets. While some investments have taken shape on the grabbed land, other pieces of grabbed land are still empty but under the guardship of military and private security firms.

The report pointed out that the leading causes of forced land evictions were the lack of legal documents for land ownership and transparent mechanisms to regulate an influx of “investors.” This lack of legal ownership is not just a symptom but the root cause of the problem, highlighting the urgent need for legal reform to protect the rights of Indigenous and local communities.

Since the Uganda government announced an industrial policy that commoditized its land to fight its unemployment, which will give Uganda a middle-income class status from a low-developed country, there has been an increase in forced land eviction cases. This policy shift, encouraging large-scale industrial projects, has raised questions about the government’s responsibility and accountability in these evictions.

Many investors fraudulently acquire communities’ land and do not conduct feasibility studies to establish whether the targeted land has interests. On many occasions, communities are not consulted about their land, and no compensation is offered.

According to the Lands Ministry’s 2016 annual report, about 23 percent of Uganda’s land is registered. The registration is mostly with freehold (where the land is owned outright), mailo (a form of land tenure in Buganda, a region in Uganda, customary tenure), and lease (where the land is leased for a specific period) tenure systems.

Go-betweens and blockers use this gap with support from some government officials to acquire land titles fraudulently and later evict bonafide land occupants (Indigenous and local communities) to give way for land-based investment.

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Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) rejects the request to dismiss the EACOP appeal case.

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5 days ago

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November 18, 2024

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By Witness Radio team.

The Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) has rejected a request by the Tanzanian government to dismiss an appeal filed by four East African civil society organizations (CSOs) seeking compliance with the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) with regional and international human rights standards.

Tanzania’s Deputy Solicitor General, Mr. Mark Mulwambo, requested the judges dismiss the Appeal, arguing that the record of proceedings from the hearings held at the First Instance Division was missing. The record of proceedings includes the CSOs and respondents’ submissions. He added that, without it, the judges at the Appellate Division could not determine whether the First Instance Court erred in the ruling that they made.

However, the court could not grant his request. Instead, it ordered the four CSOs that filed the Appeal to file supplementary information so that the judges could hear the case.

The Appeal will be heard by a panel of judges from the Appellate Division of the EACJ, including Justice Nestor Kayobera, the division’s president; Justice Anita Mugeni, the Vice President; Justice Kathurima M’Inot; Justice Cheboriona Barishaki; and Justice Omar Othman Makungu. These judges, with their expertise in regional and international law, will review the Appeal and make a final decision.

The Appeal was filed by four CSOs, including the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO) from Uganda, the Centre for Food and Adequate Living Rights (CEFROHT) from Uganda, the Natural Justice (NJ) from Kenya, and the Centre for Strategic Litigation (CSL) from Tanzania, in December 2023. This was in response to the dismissal of their case, which sought compliance with the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) with regional and international human rights standards, by judges at the First Instance Division of the EACJ in November 2023.

During the dismissal, the court ruled that the applicants filed the petition out of time, stating that the petitioners should have filed the petition as early as 2017 instead of 2020. The court also ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the case, meaning it did not have the legal authority to decide on this matter. These decisions were based on legal precedents and the specific circumstances of the case.

The CSOs were ordered to file the record of proceedings by Justice Nestor Kayobera by November 29, 2024.

The court session was attended by EACOP-affected communities from both Uganda and Tanzania. Among them was Mr. Gozanga Kyakulubya, an affected person from Kyotera District in Southern Uganda, who traveled to Arusha to participate in the hearing. His personal story underscores the profound impact of the EACOP on the lives of these communities.

He shared his grievance, stating, “I came to the court because I have a lot of pain. My land was taken for the EACOP, and before I was paid, it was fenced off. The government of Uganda also sued me because I rejected the low compensation offered by EACOP. We need at least one court to be fair to EACOP host communities, and we hope the East African Court of Justice will be that court.”

The EACOP has been designed, constructed, financed, and operated through a dedicated Pipeline Company with the same name. The shareholders in EACOP are affiliates of the three upstream joint venture partners: the Uganda National Oil Company (8%), TotalEnergies E&P Uganda (62%), and CNOOC Uganda Ltd (15%), together with the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (15%).

The 1,443km pipeline will eventually transport Uganda’s crude oil from Kabaale—Hoima to the Chongoleani peninsula near Tanga Port in Tanzania.

Climate activists and civil society organizations, however, continue to oppose the project, claiming that it will harm several fragile and protected habitats irreversibly and violate key agreements and treaties.

The potential environmental damage is a cause for concern among these groups.

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Big oil firms knew of dire effects of fossil fuels as early as 1950s, memos show

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5 days ago

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November 18, 2024

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Newly unearthed documents contain warning from head of Air Pollution Foundation, founded in 1953 by oil interests.

Major oil companies, including Shell and precursors to energy giants Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were alerted about the planet-warming effects of fossil fuels as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents show.

The warning, from the head of an industry-created group known as the Air Pollution Foundation, was revealed by Climate Investigations Center and published Tuesday by the climate website DeSmog. It represents what may be the earliest instance of big oil being informed of the potentially dire consequences of its products.

“Every time there’s a push for climate action, [we see] fossil fuel companies downplay and deny the harms of burning fossil fuels,” said Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center who uncovered the historic memos. “Now we have evidence they were doing this way back in the 50s during these really early attempts to crack down on sources of pollution.”

The Air Pollution Foundation was founded in 1953 by oil interests in response to public outcry over smog that was blanketing Los Angeles county.

Researchers had identified hydrocarbon pollution from fossil fuel sources such as cars and refineries as a primary culprit and Los Angeles officials had begun to proposal pollution controls.

The Air Pollution Foundation, which was primarily funded by the lobbying organization Western States Petroleum Association, publicly claimed to want to help solve the smog crisis, but was set up in large part to counter efforts at regulation, the new memos indicate.

It’s a commonly used tactic today, said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in climate disinformation at the University of Miami.

Fire emanating from a factory chimney
A gas flare from the Shell Chemical LP petroleum refinery burns against the sky in Louisiana. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“The Air Pollution Foundation appears to be one of the earliest and most brazen efforts by the oil industry to prop up a … front group to exaggerate scientific uncertainty to defend business as usual,” Supran said. “It helped lay the strategic and organizational groundwork for big oil’s decades of climate denial and delay.”

Then called the Western Oil and Gas Association, the lobbying group provided $1.3m to the group in the 1950s – the equivalent of $14m today – to the Air Pollution Foundation. That funding came from member companies including Shell and firms later bought by or merged with ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Sunoco and ConocoPhillips, as well as southern California utility SoCalGas.

The Air Pollution Foundation recruited the respected chemical engineer Lauren B Hitchcock to serve as its president. And in 1954, the organization – which until then was arguing that households incinerating waste in backyards was to blame – asked Caltech to submit a proposal to determine the main source of smog.

In November 1954, Caltech submitted its proposal, which included crucial warnings about the coal, oil, and gas and said that “a changing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization”, a memo previously uncovered by John shows. The newly uncovered documents show the Air Pollution Foundation shared the warning with the Western Oil and Gas Association’s members in March 1955.

In the mid-1950s, climate researchers were beginning to understand the planet-heating impact of fossil fuels, and to discuss their emergent research in the media. But the newly uncovered Air Pollution Foundation memo represents the earliest known cautionary message to the oil industry about the greenhouse effect.

The Air Pollution Foundation’s board of trustees, including representatives from SoCalGas and Union Oil, which was later acquired by Chevron, approved funding for the Caltech project. In the following months, foundation president Hitchcock advocated for pollution controls on oil refineries and then testified in favor of state-funded pollution research in the California Senate.

Hitchcock was reprimanded by industry leaders for these efforts. In an April 1955 meeting, the Western Oil and Gas Association told him he was drawing too much “attention” to refinery pollution and conducting “too broad a program” of research. The Air Pollution Foundation was meant to be “protective” of the industry and should publish “findings which would be accepted as unbiased”, meeting minutes uncovered by John show.

After this meeting, the foundation made no further reference to the potential climate impact of fossil fuels, publications reviewed by DeSmog suggest.

“The fossil fuel industry is often seen as having followed in the footsteps of the tobacco industry’s playbook for denying science and blocking regulation,” said Supran. “But these documents suggest that big oil has been running public affairs campaigns to downplay the dangers of its products just as long as big tobacco, starting with air pollution in the early-to-mid-1950s.”

In the following months, many of the foundation’s research projects were scaled back or designed to be conducted in direct partnerships with lobbying groups. Hitchcock resigned as president in 1956.

Last year, the largest county in Oregon sued the Western States Petroleum Association for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of it.

DeSmog and the Climate Investigations Center previously found that the Air Pollution Foundation underwrote the earliest studies on CO2 conducted in 1955 and 1956 by renowned climate scientist Charles David Keeling, paving the way for his groundbreaking “Keeling Curve,” which charts how fossil fuels cause an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Other earlier investigations have found that major fossil companies spent decades conducting their own research into the consequences of burning coal, oil and gas. One 2023 study found that Exxon scientists made “breathtakingly” accurate predictions of global heating in the 1970s and 1980s, only to then spend decades sowing doubt about climate science.

The newly unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the US National Archives, the University of California at San Diego, the State University of New York Buffalo archives and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s.

The Western States Petroleum Association and the American Petroleum Institute, the top US fossil fuels lobby group, did not respond to requests for comment.

Origin Source: The Guardian

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