As Uganda races toward first oil production, promises of economic transformation are colliding with unresolved grievances from the country’s oil frontier.

In Buliisa, hundreds of Balaalo pastoralists forcibly evicted in 2010 remain uncompensated, excluded from the prosperity built on the land they once bought. Enos Mubangizi remembers being woken at 5 am in December 2010, hearing hundreds of gun-wielding soldiers and police outside, rounding up cows from his family kraals and those of his neighbours.

Local pastor Stephen Mugisha, a respected pillar of his community, received a call just a day before from then-coordinator of Uganda’s national intelligence Gen David Sejusa. Sejusa informed the pastoralists that the Ugandan army was evicting all the families and their cows from their land.

“We were the only family in the area that had a bungalow, and it was demolished,” Mubangizi says, a member of the Balaalo pastoralists who also lost cows and land.

Code-named Justice, an estimated 640 families were forced out, and 20,000 head of cattle were taken. For the Balaalo people, a nomadic pastoralist group spread out in the South, Western, and Northern parts of Uganda, cows make up most of the family wealth.

The 20,000 cows were mixed, and their owners could no longer identify them. A few managed to rescue their livestock but no longer had land to graze them. The cows who were mixed in the big herd died from a lack of pasture and water. Others were sold off cheaply, sometimes for less than Shs 50,000 ($14).

Mugisha had set up a primary school and laid the foundation for what he envisioned as a mega church. He lost all of it. Another pastor, Sam Tumwine, built a house that is now occupied by police.

“I wonder who the police are paying rent to,” he says.

When contacted, the police refused our request for comment. The parcels of land in Buliisa district targeted for eviction had become nationally significant – the site of oil discovery in 2006, and where much of the production infrastructure was installed – in a race to start extracting the country’s “black gold” by the end of 2026.

The new oil frontier turned neighbours into enemies – and the question remains whether anyone was held accountable for the devastating evictions. Almost 15 years later, Mubangizi and the hundreds of other violently evicted herdsmen say they are still counting their losses and waiting for compensation.

Conflict over land and oil-era property claims

When oil was being surveyed by Tullow Oil, a multinational UK-headquartered oil and gas exploration company, Mugisha says they asked the geologists if their cows would be allowed to continue grazing, and they were reassured this was fine.

The conflict between pastoralists and the local community started in 2007, less than a year later. Oil discovery had an immediate impact on the community: suddenly, people saw value in land and raced to transform it from a communal to an individual land tenure system.

As land values rose, disputes emerged over whether some sales of customary land were valid under local tenure arrangements. At the time, Buliisa was an extremely rural community, whose life was still communal, including land ownership.

Land possessed little value, costing about Shs 50,000 per acre at the time of Uganda’s confirmation of commercial oil discovery in 2006. District chair Fred Lukumu said he regarded some transactions as invalid because, in his view, sellers lacked exclusive title.

“It was an illegal transaction because people were selling what did not exclusively belong to them,” Lukumu said. “They were never verifying… just paying whoever told them land was theirs,” he adds.

Buliisa subcounty chairperson Kabagambe Kamanda doesn’t dispute the claim that pastoralists had bought land; rather, how the acquisitions were documented and understood locally.

By 2003, the numerous pastoralists who had come to graze cattle had started buying land. Pastoralists said they had consulted community members who informed them that they had the right to purchase and own property. Kamanda claimed that some buyers took advantage of weak land documentation and low public awareness of land law; pastoralists dispute that account.

He claims that, in some cases, acreage recorded in sale paperwork did not match what sellers believed they had agreed to. Frederick Watume, who was vice chairperson of Buliisa sub-county at the time, said some agreements brought to him lacked details he considered necessary, including acreage.

Though the herdsmen were trying to follow the law by ensuring that their land purchase agreements were stamped by local council leaders, the land purchase agreements brought to him for signing were defective.

“They would say, mukongolo (natives) sold land to such mulaalo (herdsmen), no acreage. Nothing,” he said in an interview.

“I warned them that in future, you’re going to lose this land.”

The local community says the herdsmen, who did not fence their cattle, were destroying crops. Lukumu says people were facing food shortages and the pastoralists would even beat natives trying to chase cows from their gardens.

COMING TO BULIISA IN THE 1980S

The Balaalo herder families’ ordeal began in December 2010, but the story started 30 years before. The herders thought they found a happy ending in the Buliisa area after being evicted from government property that was later sold to Indian sugarcane growers.

Balaalo people who were looking for jobs in the 1980s had come to the Buliisa community to take care of cows, and would pay them with milk, says Bernard Barugahare, an elder from the village and former district community development officer.

“They [herdsmen] kept coming, increasing, and in the process, they sold milk and started buying cows,” Barugahare said.

He says it was these herdsmen who invited their fellow tribesmen to come to Buliisa at the beginning of the 2000s. Pastor Mugisha reiterates that the invitation was extended by natives in the area.

EMPTY-HANDED, EVEN AFTER FILING CLAIMS

From interviews with more than 40 people, including the pastoralists, residents, local leaders, and civil society members, oil was the main factor in the eviction of the Balaalo.

Local leaders in the area remember the names of evicted herders well, but when asked directly about properties left behind, they give vague answers. They insist the pastoralists were compensated by the government and should not make any claims.

“Anybody who did not come back to claim property up to now has no moral authority to make a claim,” says Kamanda Kabagambe, the chairperson for Buliisa sub-county, whose office is less than two kilometres from Tumwine’s former home.

“Since 2011, I don’t think anyone would have failed to claim if there was any destruction that was not legal.”

A local journalist who covered the pastoralist-native conflicts between 2007 and 2010 describes it as “a terrible eviction,” adding that “people lost everything”.

The journalist Stephen Kabindi followed up with those he had interviewed in subsequent years, who were living with relatives for over a decade. “They will never be the same,” he says.

On X, Gen Sejusa indicated that this evacuation was carried out under orders from the Ugandan cabinet. He headed the security arm, while then-prime minister Apolo Nsibambi headed the overall task force. “No property or life was lost,” he wrote.

TURNING A BLIND EYE?

The Tilenga project is operated by French petroleum giant TotalEnergies EP Uganda on behalf of a joint venture that includes the government of Uganda and state-owned China National Offshore Oil Company. TotalEnergies is the majority shareholder with 56.67% of the project.

The French oil company acquired a stake in Uganda’s oil project 14 months after the eviction. Since then, legal battles in Uganda have ensued as pastoralists seek justice that still evades them to today. TotalEnergies maintains that the government’s responsibility is in the hands of the Ugandan authorities.

“Land acquisition has been implemented on behalf of the Government of Uganda under an approved framework aligned with national law and international standards,” François Sinecan, a press officer at TotalEnergies, said.

“Challenges – such as absentee owners or overlapping claims – have been addressed through formal grievance channels and, if unresolved, referred to competent authorities,” he adds.

Juliette Renaud, senior campaigner at Friends of the Earth France, which sued TotalEnergies over rights violations in Uganda, said that Total should have assessed more fully the human-rights risks associated with oil development in the region.

“You can see these evictions in the oil region started before TotalEnergies came to Uganda and they didn’t do a proper risk assessment of the human rights violations that could be linked to the oil development,” she says.

Sinecan says all land acquisition for Tilenga follows rigorous due diligence under The Land Acquisition Resettlement Framework (LARF) and Resettlement Action Plans (RAPs).

‘NOT INTERESTED IN OIL’

Politics too played a role in the eviction as local politicians warned the ruling party, including President Museveni, of their waning popularity if they failed to evict the Balaalo pastoralists, who share a close connection to Museveni’s pastoralist Bahima community.

After the oil discovery, a suspicion ran through local crop farming communities – who made up a large majority of the residents – that the second wave of pastoralists, who arrived in the area at the turn of the century, had come to steal their oil.

“The politicians started spreading false information that we had occupied local people’s land that had oil,” Mugisha says, adding, “as [cattle] herders, we were not interested in oil.”

Stephen Biraahwa Mukitale, a former member of parliament of Buliisa county who played a central role in pushing the government to evict the pastoralists, says he has never had a doubt that these pastoralists migrated to the area because they had prior knowledge about oil. He describes them as being fronts of powerful people who wanted to grab local people’s land.

“The locations where they went to in 2003, 2004 and 2005… the oil prospecting had started only to find out that all the oil wells and the pipeline as confirmed today are the very areas where these people had chosen to be,” Mukitale says, referring to the pastoralists. In interviews, other politicians in the Buliisa community who rallied for the eviction used terminologies like, “maybe”, “we suspect,” “we believe” in arguing that the herdsmen had prior knowledge.

HIGH COURT JUDGEMENT, BUT STILL NO RELIEF

Although there was a push for the pastoralists to be evicted after oil was discovered in 2006, the Balaalo fought it in court for four years, halting the process. In a 2013 high court judgment in a land case filed by the evicted pastoralists, Judge Ralph Ochan described their eviction as an “unlawful and a gross violation of rights” as provided for in Uganda’s constitution and other international instruments.

“The Balaalo were, on the evidence on record, violently and brutally evicted without any lawful orders of this or any other court,” wrote Judge Ochan. In the judgment, he took note of public rhetoric and demagoguery by political leaders in Buliisa district that stoked up anti-Balaalo sentiments.

Ordering the return of the pastoralists to “land they acquired through lawful purchase would in all probability lead to grave social unrest”, according to Ochan.

These reporters were shown a land purchase agreement that the herdsmen had signed with the locals, showing clear details of the land they had purchased and duly signed by all parties.

It is part of the evidence that had been presented in court and that their lawyers continue to assert while seeking compensation. The pastoralists reject the accusations of bad blood between them and the local communities, arguing that they had forged a good relationship.

“The locals loved us a lot; they never fought us. We were a united community. It’s politics that killed the good relationship and led to the eviction,” says pastoralist Mubangizi.

FORGOTTEN IN OIL COMPENSATION

The process of assessing, valuing, and acquiring land for oil projects began around 2015, and compensation for pastoralists was left out of the equation. While government officials interviewed acknowledge the “pastoralists question”, they argue that their case happened long before the land acquisition and compensation process. They further claim that a rigorous, multi-layered process ensured that compensation money was given to the rightful owners.

“For us, this process didn’t look at the particularity of the Balaalo. It looked at ownership. The Balaalo issue was 2010; the compensation was for 2019/20,” Ali Ssekatawa, director of Legal and Corporate Affairs at the Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU), said in an interview.

“If someone had been removed in 2010, is no longer on the ground, and there is no evidence, then there was no legal basis to be paid. If that person had a title that hadn’t been cancelled and was genuine, then that person was one of those who were paid,” he adds.

The ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, in a written response, said the 2010 eviction of the Balaalo pastoralists was a complex issue rooted in long-standing land disputes between the pastoralists and indigenous communities.

The ministry says it remains focused on its role in facilitating oil exploration and development within the broader government framework.

While the energy ministry described the eviction as a government decision based on court orders and efforts to address illegal occupation and escalating ethnic tensions, it acknowledges that it played a role in the process.

“The ministry supported the overarching government effort to enforce existing land laws and create an enabling environment for oil activities, while working with other relevant ministries to address the underlying land tenure issues. Our focus was on ensuring that any land acquired for oil development was done legally and with due process, within the context of these pre-existing disputes,” the ministry says.

DISPUTE OVER BLAME FOR ABUSES

Nicholas Opiyo, a human rights lawyer who documented the 2010 eviction, says oil companies, under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, have an obligation to ensure their investments do not lead to the abuse of affected communities’ rights.

Opiyo says oil companies benefiting from the project should bear a share of responsibility for harms suffered by affected communities.

“It’s clear that Total, Tullow and other companies hid behind the government to avoid responsibility, in some cases subcontracting their roles to private companies,” he said.

“They owe a duty of reparation and restitution to those communities. They can’t run away from those obligations.” A spokesperson for Tullow said the company “operates in strict accordance with all applicable international laws and regulations” and always seeks to “uphold the highest standards of ethical conduct and respect for human rights” in all its operations.

At a May 2025 conference that brought together civil society organisations, oil companies and government officials to discuss social and human rights issues in Uganda’s oil and gas sector, TotalEnergies EP Uganda General Manager Philippe Groueix said the Uganda project has become the most scrutinised project in the world.

“I would like to hear from the people themselves. To express that they have been positively impacted is not for us to decide; it’s up to them to share that their life today is better than before, and better than it would have been without the project,” Groueix said.

In a 2020 study, the World Bank estimated that Uganda could earn $800m per year, becoming a linchpin for economic transformation. But for the forgotten pastoralists, they believe that their future is doomed because of the oil.

When we arrived at the home of Mugisha on a sweltering afternoon, he was reluctant to revisit the ordeal his community had endured over the past 15 years as they sought justice. He thought speaking to strangers was pointless, as it would not bring a resolution.

Eventually, he spoke. For nearly an hour, he recounted what the eviction had meant for them, their immense losses and the suffering they had endured since.

“We are now very poor. We didn’t know that until now a person could find himself with nothing,” he said.

Source: observer.ug

For as long as Moses K. Asaba can remember, his family has lived on the ancestral land they call home.

A resident of Bugana village in Uganda’s Buliisa district, he speaks with a deep sense of uncertainty and frustration, no longer certain that he and his descendants will continue living there.

“I say the discovery of oil within our district, it was a curse to me and to my parents, because the land-grabbers got interested in Buliisa,” Asaba says, referring to what happened after the discovery of oil in mid-western Uganda in 2006.

In a race to kick off oil production in Buliisa, French energy and petroleum giant TotalEnergies E&P has been setting up infrastructure. While Ugandan officials promise that the industry will transform the fortunes of the country, Asaba thinks otherwise.

A SYMBOL OF CONFLICT

Their homes are located about 2.5 kilometres from an oil well, a petroleum terminology that refers to the area where a rig will be installed for drilling, one of the several places designated for drilling in the community.

Our reporters waded through a small river, guided by children found bathing in the stream, in order to get to the Ngara oil well, less than 50 metres beyond the river.

Hidden from view by tall grass and wild trees, it is neatly demarcated and fenced, with no indication that the land it sits on has been under dispute for 15 years.

This well is a symbol of the complex land conflicts sparked by the discovery of oil and the construction of oil-related infrastructure in the Albertine region. The conflict pits the local community members against Francis Kahwa, a businessman in his 70s. The businessman acquired a title deed for the piece of land.

“It’s not only Kahwa. There are very many prominent names behind the land-grabbing,” Asaba says. This land dispute also reveals how land conflicts supposedly resolved by the locals evicting the Balaalo pastoralist community due to oil discovery were never resolved.

‘It’s not the government’s fault’ government officials don’t want to take any blame for this particular strife between the local community and Kahwa.

“That dispute is not with the government,” Ali Ssekatawa, director of legal and corporate affairs at the Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU), said.

The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development said the land where TotalEnergies E&P company is operating, which includes the Ngara oil well, is where “compensation remains outstanding and is subject to court proceedings”.

Government officials also insist that this conflict won’t derail the start of oil production scheduled to begin before the end of 2026.

They indicate that the Ngara oil well is not among those that will be drilled first for oil production.  Its drilling is not expected to begin for another seven to 10 years, officials said, adding that TotalEnergies can continue its operations while the ownership dispute is resolved in court. Any rent payments will be held in escrow and released to the legal owner once the case is settled.

THE SPAN OF THE CONFLICT

According to community leaders, Kahwa claims to have bought more than 500 acres from the local council chairman in the area around 2011 when the Balaalo pastoralists had been evicted.

“He has an agreement and a stamp. How is it possible?” Kamanda Kabagambe, Buliisa sub-county chairperson, said.

Repeated requests to Kahwa for an interview went unanswered. After the eviction of pastoralists, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni directed that the land should be placed under the Buliisa district land board for supervision.

Local leaders question how the land slipped through the hands of the district’s land board into the hands of a private businessman like Kahwa.

In 2011, Museveni also issued several directives – both verbal and written – that all land titles that had been issued in Buliisa district be revoked.

The Ministry of Lands announced in 2017 that it had cancelled all land titles issued in the district between 2010 and 2017.

In a subsequent interview, Uganda’s then-minister of lands Betty Amongi argued that one person couldn’t own the size of the land that Kahwa claimed to have purchased through the right channels.

Despite these directives and the cancellation of titles, Kahwa ultimately prevailed in court. In 2022, he won a ruling recognising him as the rightful owner of more than 500 acres of land.

The court issued orders directing the government to pay him rent for the oil well situated on the land. However, the community appealed to a higher court, extending the court battles. As a result, government payments for rent on the designated oil parcels stopped once again.

The money is “being held in an account until we see the winner because for us, we don’t know the winner”, Ssekatawa says.

Last year, the government’s anti-corruption unit arrested Kahwa and prosecuted him for allegedly using forged documents to claim ownership of land in the same oil district.

The case, however, concerned a different parcel from the one on which the Ngara oil well is located. Land ownership, a national challenge In interviews, Ugandan government officials credit themselves for doing excellent work.

Total Energies EP has said it has registered a 99% land compensation rate. Ssekatawa argues that the land conflicts seen in oil-producing areas are not unique to the sector or region of Uganda.

He explains that Uganda’s land tenure system is “fundamentally distorted”, with multiple ownership systems often overlapping on the same piece of land. Land disputes are a nationwide problem, with more than 70 per cent of High court cases relating to land or succession.

This, Ssekatawa adds, leads to disputes between private individuals or communities, or between individuals and the government, often regarding compensation.

“The oil and gas footprint is so small in the country,” he says, noting that the same challenges occur whether land is acquired for an oil rig or any other government project.

Collins Opio, Total Energies EP Uganda project manager for land acquisition and livelihood restoration, also says the absence of formal land titles, undocumented inheritance arrangements and unmapped land boundaries frequently lead to ownership disputes and delays in compensation.

“This resulted in recurring boundary disputes and required extensive community engagement, repeated surveys, and legal support to ensure compensation reached the rightful beneficiaries,” Opio said in a 2025 Total report.

To address land disputes, Ssekatawa says the government set up a multi-level system to verify land ownership, helping conflict parties mediate, which resulted in ensuring that compensation only went to the right people.

For the land needed for Total’s project, more than 5,500 total stakeholders were impacted by land acquisition, with 775 primary residences relocated.

“Over 99% of compensation agreements have been signed and paid, and 100% of the planned resettlement houses for physically displaced persons have been constructed and handed over, complete with land titles,” the ministry said in a written response.

In the 2025 Total report, the company says it held more than 10,000 engagements in project-affected areas of Buliisa district.

It also leveraged mass communication channels to broaden its outreach, broadcasting 1,445 radio engagements, including talk shows, advertisements and public announcements. However, it doesn’t detail if any of the engagements were related to land.

More oil-related conflicts Many other disputes in Uganda — especially land conflicts — have been sparked by oil discovery and the development of oil-related infrastructure, some of which have been in litigation for more than a decade and are still ongoing.

One such conflict involves a piece of land measuring more than 300 acres where TotalEnergies is building a central processing facility. Some of the affected landowners took the government to court, resisting attempts to resettle them in areas with poorer or no social services.

In 2023, 26 Ugandans, supported by local and international NGOs, filed a case in Paris, France, accusing TotalEnergies’ Tilenga and the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) projects of causing serious human rights violations.

Juliette Renaud, senior campaigner at Friends of the Earth France, one of the organisations that sued TotalEnergies, said that under French law, the company has a responsibility to prevent human rights violations associated with its activities anywhere in the world.

“Part of prevention is identifying risks, and what we are saying is that they haven’t identified the human rights violations linked to the project,” she says.

Diana Nabiruma, manager for programmes and communication at the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), says communities affected by the Tilenga oil project have repeatedly called on TotalEnergies to hold public meetings.

AFIEGO, a Ugandan non-profit, provides legal support to dozens of people involved in land disputes in the region. Residents want a forum to collectively discuss compensation and other concerns related to land conflicts.

Nabiruma says the company largely prefers engaging households individually rather than meeting communities as a group.

“Communities believe that when they are together, their negotiating power is much stronger,” Nabiruma says, explaining that individual meetings can leave vulnerable landowners feeling intimidated and less able to raise concerns.

Enos Babyenda, who was born in Bugana village, home to Total’s Buliisa District oil well, says whether individually or together, he feels deluded by the whole process.

“When we first heard of oil, we thought that oil had come as a blessing to us, but it has now become the opposite,” he said.

Source: observer.ug/

KRC cannot proceed with the eviction until the State fully complies with the court’s previous directives and the constitutional requirements governing forced evictions.

The High Court has rejected an application by Kenya Railways Corporation (KRC) seeking the implementation of eviction orders against residents of Nairobi’s Muthurwa estate, holding that the constitutional safeguards governing forced evictions have not yet been met.

In a ruling delivered by Justice Kanyi Kimondo, the court found that although KRC remains the lawful owner of the property, it cannot proceed with the eviction until all conditions set out in previous court orders and the Constitution are fully complied with.

The dispute, filed as Satrose Ayuma and 11 Others v KRC, involves families who have lived in the estate for decades as tenants of the Corporation.

Justice Kimondo noted that the court had, in its landmark judgment delivered on August 26, 2013, laid down strict safeguards intended to protect the dignity and rights of people facing eviction.

Among the conditions, the court directed that evictions should not be carried out at night, during adverse weather, on public holidays or festivals, or immediately before school examinations.

“These forced evictions must not take place at night, in bad weather, during festivals or holidays, prior to or just before school exams, and preferably at the end of the school term or during school holidays. No one is subjected to indiscriminate attacks,” the judge reiterated from the earlier orders.

Following the 2013 judgment, KRC and the residents entered mediation to agree on a structured eviction programme. However, the negotiations failed, prompting the Corporation to return to court in May 2014 seeking directions on how to implement the judgment.

The court also recalled orders issued in December 2015 requiring the residents to vacate by April 30, 2016, while directing the State to present, within 60 days, details of the legislative and policy framework governing forced evictions and the protection of the constitutional rights to housing and sanitation.

Justice Kimondo observed that more than a decade later, no evidence had been presented to show that the State had complied with those directions.

“Despite the very clear order… no such evidence was exhibited in the application, notwithstanding that it is now 13 years since the order was issued,” he said.

The judge further found that KRC had failed to demonstrate that the constitutional safeguards necessary to protect affected residents were in place.

“There was no information detailing the legislative and policy framework that the State has put in place to regulate forced evictions and demolitions and to advance constitutional rights to adequate housing and reasonable sanitation,” the court held.

Emphasising that compliance with its earlier orders could not be selective, Justice Kimondo ruled: “Partial or selective implementation of certain components alone or leaving out others is impermissible and cannot be sanctioned by this Honourable Court.”

The application was consequently dismissed, meaning KRC cannot proceed with the eviction until the State fully complies with the court’s previous directives and the constitutional requirements governing forced evictions.

Source: eastleighvoice.co.ke