THE WITNESS
Uganda; Land for smallholder farmers is vanishing unbated
Published
6 years agoon
By witnessradio.org Team,
“…Land in Uganda belongs to the citizens of Uganda and shall vest in them in accordance with the land tenure systems provided for in this Constitution…” states article 237 of the 1995 Constitution of the Republic of Uganda.
The Constitution portrays land ownership as a progressive journey however, the reality is that an ordinary citizen may find it hard to own land as inequality was entrenched within a social-political system that continue to enact and implement land policies and laws, which govern ownership and usage.
Majority citizens’ livelihood and survival has been proved to be on land according to 2016 figures from Uganda National Bureau of Statistics (UBOS). The figures indicate that nearly 70 percent of households are engaged in subsistence farming of which, 82 percent are in rural areas and dependent on agriculture.
Last May 2018, the Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) released a report on “Land Disputes and Human Rights in Selected Regions” indicating that almost half of the total land in Uganda is being claimed by those with power and money. The research was carried out to understand the impact of land disputes on enjoyment of fundamental human rights and freedoms. It was carried out in selected districts in all regions of Uganda.
Between 2006 and 2010, New Forests Company (NFC) with protection from Uganda’s army and police force violently evicted over 22,500 natives off their land in Kiboga and Mubende districts totaling to 9,300 hectares to make way for tree plantation. Today, the people evicted from the land are desperate, having been driven into poverty and landlessness.
According to available court documents, both evictions in Kiboga and Mubende districts were carried out as there were high court orders restraining the NFC, its agent and workers from continuing with evictions.
For an example; on 19 June 2009 the Uganda High Court issued an interim order on Kiboga eviction ‘restraining the respondent [i.e. the New Forests Company], its workers, agents, assignees … from evicting the applicants and their families, destroying their crops, schools, hospitals, social infrastructure and livestock.
NFC has attracted investment from international banks and private equity funds since 2008. The European Investment Bank (EIB), the EU’s financing institution, has loaned NFC five million Euros to expand one of its Ugandan plantations. Agri-Vie Agribusiness Fund, a private equity investment fund focused on food and agribusiness in sub-Saharan Africa, has invested $6.7m in NFC. Agri-Vie is itself backed by development finance institutions, notably the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). The most significant investment in NFC came from HSBC (around $10m), which gave HSBC 20 per cent ownership of the company and one of six seats on the NFC Board.
Close to seventeen years now, over 4000 former Kaweeri smallholder farmers have been fighting to get back their land but the battle is still far from Completion.
In August 2001, indigenous communities were violently evicted off their 2524 hectares which they had been living on for several decades. The land covered four villages Kitemba, Luwunga, Kijunga and Kiryamakobe in Maddudu sub county, Mubende district.
The Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF, a government army) forced them to leave their premises because the semi-statal Uganda Investment Authority (UIA) wanted to lease it to the Kaweri Coffee Plantation Ltd, a 100% subsidiary of the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe (NKG) based in Hamburg/Germany. The eviction was described by the evictees as particularly cruel.
The soldiers set houses on fire and demolished them, including the fully equipped private clinic of the community and six churches. Movable properties were looted and crops were cut down and uprooted. The Kitemba primary school (a formal school for the villages) after the eviction has been used as the headquarters of Kaweri/NKG Coffee plantation.
Victims that spoke to witnessradio.org said that the eviction was carried out on privately owned land. Although the Uganda’s legal process is very slow but in 2002, affected communities with support from NGOs went to court (Civil Suit No. 179 of 2002) at Nakawa High Court (Kampala). After 12 years of waiting, the judge ruled in favor of the evictees on 28th of March 2013. The judgment allowed the evictees to get back to their land and damages be compensated to a total of (37,085,574,606.3 UGX – about US dollars 10 million caused by the eviction.
On 12th, August 2013, the Ugandan government appealed against the ruling in the Appeal Court. Civil Appeal No. 144 of 2013 arising out of H.C. Civil Suit No. 1779/2002. Up to now, the case has not been fixed for hearing.
In 2015, the matter was referred to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). During its sittings, the committee was alarmed by repeated cases of forced evictions of communities as well as lack of restitution, compensation or provision of alternative housing.
The Committee recommended that Uganda government refrain from forcibly evicting individuals and expropriating land, regardless of the context. On a particular note, the CESCR urges to the State party to “take immediate measures to ensure that the rights of the Mubende community are restored” however more than two years, no action has been taken.
The 23 year old Constitution recognizes four tenure systems under which a citizen can own land, namely; Customary; freehold; mailo and leasehold; establishes institutions that are mandated to hold and manage land on behalf of the natives including Uganda land Commission, District Land Boards on top the mother ministry of land but they (institutions) are facing independence and credibility challenges before any citizen.
Subordinate laws to Constitution that set standards for any investment on land including the Investment Code Act has not been respected and applied to protect land owners from losing their land.
The latest development that will finally seal a land deal for the rich and powerful in Uganda; is the government proposal to amend Article 26 of the Constitution to enable the government to acquire private land for public purposes without prior compensation.
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THE WITNESS
Enemies of the State: Resistance to the EACOP becomes a deadly task
Published
5 months agoon
July 3, 2024It is no secret: in Uganda it is badly about human rights. With the construction of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, repression against lawyers, but activists and journalists is taking on new proportions. They are staged as enemies of the state. The human rights organisation Witness Radio reports from Uganda.
The morning of the 15th April 2024 in the court of the Ugandan city of Hoima did not go as usual: court officials, police officers and passers-by watched helplessly as a crowd led by the activist Fred Mwesigwa read a petition in the Hoima High Court: “We are deeply concerned about the recent court ruling that orders the expulsion of 42 families in the Buliisa district to make room for the Tilga project.” They protested against a court order of December 2023, which gave the government the green light to the community to expel the community for the oil production project. The community had previously refused to accept the government-intended compensation payments for their country, on which they live and from which they live.
The Buliisa case is just the tip of the iceberg of the many communities affected by oil production projects. In Uganda and Tanzania, the rural population in particular has to give way to a 30-metre-wide pipeline corridor, oil production fields, tank farms, infrastructure and safety zones around the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). According to a study published in 2022 by the organisation Les Amis de la Terre, up to 118,000 people could be affected by resettlement along the pipeline route, including mainly farming communities.
Low discompensation
In a conversation with Witness Radio, those affected reported that they were no longer in a position to meet their basic needs due to insufficient compensation and inadequate resettlement plans. James 1, who was taken to the Kyakaboga resettlement camp, declared that the inhabitants had been provided with infertile land that was unsuitable for the cultivation of crops. In addition, the camps are overcrowded, which means that the residents are exposed to illness. He stressed that access to health services is particularly challenging. Pregnant women in particular are facing difficulties, as the nearest health centre is eight kilometres away. Tragically, James said, three pregnant womans would have lost their babies on their way to there.
“Their houses were set on fire, their ownness was plundered.”For the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, climate, nature and people need to give way
Uganda’s oil dilemmaControversies about the black gold
Black Gold from East AfricaConstruction of the EACOP crude oil pipeline is imminent
As in the case of the 42 households from Buliisa, who refused compensation from the government, many of the EACOP projects say those affected that the government did not adequately assess their land and property. Nevertheless, they were forced to release their land for the project. They criticised the fact that they were not sufficiently sensitised to the negative effects of the project. Instead, the government and the majority shareholders Totalenergies promised large compensation, prosperity growth and employment opportunities that have not yet occurred.
A study by Inclusive Development International also concludes that, in accordance with international standards, the government and TotalEnergies have systematically failed to involve the people affected by the project and civil society in the planning and providing them with low-threshold information. The study also states that when testing the environmental impact of Tilenga, Kingfisher and EACOP, it was found that the project promoters do not use the “best available techniques” to prevent the impact on the impact of ecosystems. The decision to use low-cost technologies for oil drilling and water-leading areas is therefore a predictable risk to the health and safety of local residents.
Opposition underesired
When the first land survey for the Tilenga project took place in 2020, many families expected to benefit from the project. Later, however, TotalEnergies aimed to acquire their country free of charge. In consultation with some real estate agents, local authorities, police and army, the company distributed almost 20,000 people in Kapapi (Hoima) in February 2023. In the course of this, women were also raped. Before the forced expulsion, the local police, in cooperation with the real estate brokers, had arrested those who criticised the land grab in order to intimidate the other members of the community.
Activists are presented as ‘anti-development’
The seven defenders of the plaintive families, Karongo Edward, Mulega Eria, Kataza Samuel, Rangira Stephen, Rubyogo Edward and Mbombo Stephen, were charged with a host of alleged crimes. In June 2023, after three to five months in prison, they were released on bail. However, as part of their bail pads, they must report regularly to the court in Hoima.
The criminalisation of land and environmentalists has become a common tactic by the Ugandan authorities in order to silence opposition and maintain impunity. This tactic does not only exist in Uganda, it is a global problem – especially in the context of large infrastructure projects.
According to the data from Witness Radio, in seven out of ten cases of evictions, defenders are subjected to targeted violence, torture and arbitrary arrests. They are often falsely charged with a large number of crimes ranging from domestic peace and attempted murder. At the end of June 2023, Witness Radio reported that more and more environmental and land-legal defenders who uncover questionable business are targeting state controls. From 2010 to 2023, more than 1,500 people. In connection with the pipeline, Witness Radio has documented 75 cases of arbitrary arrests, detentions and forced disappearances since the first construction work.
Opposition to the EACOP has become a mortal danger. Activists and human rights activists are confronted with hate speech, arrests, torture and death threats and are portrayed as ‘honsensible to development’ – on the grounds that they would promote the interests of Western countries.
The Resistance goes on
Ugandan activist Bob Barigye reports that the state security forces are using “false accusations” to arrest activists. “We are considered enemies of the state,” says Barigye. “The police are now preferting psychological torture because physical torture would create poor publicity for the oil pipeline project, which could deter investors and insurers. The government does not want to be in the international spotlight for the wrong reasons.”
Not only the project opponents, but also journalists in Uganda find it difficult to report on the EACOP projects: Gerald Tenywa is a Ugandan science journalist who has been reporting intensively on environmental protests for decades. In an interview with Drilled Media, he describes the difficulties in reporting on EACOP activists who criticise the construction of the pipeline. He cites the government’s intolerance to protests as a hurdle for journalistic work and stresses that in developing countries “oil and politics have almost always merged”.
“Oil and politics are almost always fused”
Emmanuel Okello works for the Uganda Radio Network in the Ugandan Albertine region. According to him, reporting is also made more difficult by the fact that the government and the companies involved keep the most important information about the oil projects under wraps. “A lot is claimed to promote these projects, including the development of the communities,” says Okello, “but this is not the case on the ground. People do not benefit from the projects, they only destroy their livelihoods. If you ask the government who exactly the beneficiaries they are talking about, there is no clear answer.”
It remains a difficult task to bring the voices of the affected communities into the public and to cope with the associated repression. It is also connected with obstacles to achieving justice through legal route. Thus, the court in Hoima rejected the application for the cessation of the evictions of the 42 families in Buliisa mentioned above.
The presentation of the plight of these communities, the protection of the environment and support for court cases are crucial, especially at a time when the space for civil society and media freedom in Uganda is becoming ever smaller. This requires cooperation with international groups and support for civil societies and media.
Source: www.iz3w.org
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DEFENDING LAND AND ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS
Statement: The Energy Sector Strategy 2024–2028 Must Mark the End of the EBRD’s Support to Fossil Fuels
Published
1 year agoon
September 27, 2023The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is due to publish a new Energy Sector Strategy before the end of 2023. A total of 130 civil society organizations from over 40 countries have released a statement calling on the EBRD to end finance for all fossil fuels, including gas.
From 2018 to 2021, the EBRD invested EUR 2.9 billion in the fossil energy sector, with the majority of this support going to gas. This makes it the third biggest funder of fossil fuels among all multilateral development banks, behind the World Bank Group and the Islamic Development Bank.
The EBRD has already excluded coal and upstream oil and gas fields from its financing. The draft Energy Sector Strategy further excludes oil transportation and oil-fired electricity generation. However, the draft strategy would continue to allow some investment in new fossil gas pipelines and other transportation infrastructure, as well as gas power generation and heating.
In the statement, the civil society organizations point out that any new support to gas risks locking in outdated energy infrastructure in places that need investments in clean energy the most. At the same time, they highlight, ending support to fossil gas is necessary, not only for climate security, but also for ensuring energy security, since continued investment in gas exposes countries of operation to high and volatile energy prices that can have a severe impact on their ability to reach development targets. Moreover, they underscore that supporting new gas transportation infrastructure is not a solution to the current energy crisis, given that new infrastructure would not come online for several years, well after the crisis has passed.
The signatories of the statement call on the EBRD to amend the Energy Sector Strategy to
- fully exclude new investments in midstream and downstream gas projects;
- avoid loopholes involving the use of unproven or uneconomic technologies, as well as aspirational but meaningless mitigation measures such as “CCS-readiness”; and
- strengthen the requirements for financial intermediaries where the intended nature of the sub-transactions is not known to exclude fossil fuel finance across the entire value chain.
Source: iisd.org
Download the statement: https://www.iisd.org/system/files/2023-09/ngo-statement-on-energy-sector-strategy-2024-2028.pdf
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DEFENDING LAND AND ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS
Breaking: Three community land rights defenders from Kawaala have been arrested.
Published
2 years agoon
July 12, 2022Breaking: Three community land rights defenders from Kawaala have been arrested.
By Witness Radio team
Police at Old Kampala Regional Police Headquarter have arrested three of the six community land rights defenders from Kawaala Zone II, Kampala suburb, and preferred a fraud charge before being released on bond.
Kasozi Paul, Busobolwa Adam, and Kabugo Micheal got arrested on their arrival before being taken inside interrogation rooms. They were questioned from 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM local time and later recorded their statements.
Section 342 of the Penal Code states that forgery is the making of a false document with the intent to defraud or deceive. It carries a three year imprisonment on conviction.
According to lawyers representing victims, defenders are arrested on the orders of the Deputy Resident City Commissioner (RCC) in charge of Rubaga Division Anderson Burora and accused them of fraud.
Resident City Commissioner is a representative of the president in the Capital City at the division level.
The charges are a result of continued resistance by Kawaala community seeking fair compensation and resettlement before Lubigi drainage channel is constructed. Since the first COVID outbreak in 2020, the victim defenders and others have been leading a pushback campaign to stop forced evictions by a multimillion dollars Kampala Institutional and Infrastructure Development Project (KIIDP-2) funded by World Bank. Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) is the implementor of the project.
This project first impacted Kawaala Zone II around 2014, when a channel diversion was constructed. The current planned expansion will widen that channel and require forced evictions across an area at least 70 meters wide and 2.5 km long.
The New Vision, a local daily of June 21st, 2022, quoted Burora accusing Kasozi Paul, one of the community land rights defenders from Kawaala Zone II of being a fraudster.
Witness Radio – Uganda challenges the deputy RCC Burora to produce evidence that pins the defenders on fraud instead of criminalizing the work of defenders.
“We warn Mr. Burora against using police to harass defenders who have openly opposed a project which is causing negative impacts on the community” Adong Sarah, one of the lawyers representing the defenders said.
The defenders got released on police bond as they are expected to report back to the police on Monday, the 18th of July 2022 at 11:00 AM local time.
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Resource Center
- LAND GRABS AT GUNPOINT REPORT IN KIRYANDONGO DISTRICT
- 12 KEY DEMANDS FROM CSOS TO WORLD LEADERS AT THE OPENING OF COP16 IN SAUDI ARABIA
- PRESENDIANTIAL DIRECTIVE BANNING ALL LAND EVICTIONS IN UGANDA
- FORCED LAND EVICTIONS IN UGANDA: TRENDS, RIGHTS OF DEFENDERS, IMPACT AND CALL FOR ACTION
- FROM LAND GRABBERS TO CARBON COWBOYS A NEW SCRAMBLE FOR COMMUNITY LANDS TAKES OFF
- African Faith Leaders Demand Reparations From The Gates Foundation.
- GUNS, MONEY AND POWER GRABBED OVER 1,975,834 HECTARES OF LAND; BROKE FAMILIES IN MUBENDE DISTRICT.
- THE SITUATION OF PLANET, ENVIRONMENTAL AND LAND RIGHTS DEFENDERS IS FURTHER DETERIORATING IN UGANDA AS 2023 WITNESSED A RECORD OF OVER 180 ATTACKS.
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