Uganda’s Oil Pipeline Project Threatening Livelihoods of Thousands of Displaced People
Kampala, 16 November 2022:- A newly published field report by Just Finance International and the Environment Governance Institute in Uganda finds that Chinese state oil company CNOOC and French multinational oil and gas company TotalEnergies are complicit in threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of families who live between Uganda’s Lake Albert and the shoreline of Tanzania.
In Risk Of Poverty After Land Acquisitions For Uganda’s Mega Oil Pipeline, Just Finance International reports that while land is being expropriated by the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), a consortium owned by the governments of Uganda and Tanzania, French oil company TotalEnergies, and China’s parastatal energy giant CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation), EACOP faces accusations of providing inadequate compensation to displaced families, increasing the vulnerability of elderly and disabled people, and ignoring female-headed households.
“EACOP should halt all construction work in Uganda until all the communities are fairly compensated and all land disputes due to the acquisition process have been solved,” said Nils Resare Senior researcher at Just Finance International.
“The ongoing acquisition has created widespread unrest and anxiety in communities along the pipeline route where land has been compulsorily acquired”, said Resare. “No one that Just Finance International met during our recent field visits along the pipeline route was satisfied with the compensation they had received or been offered, claiming the money won’t buy them equivalent farmland elsewhere or housing. Some claimed they were offered 30-50 percent less than the value of the land they had to give, which left them unable to replace the same piece of land even within the same area.”
“We are calling on EACOP to respect both our human rights and our country’s national heritage”, said Samuel Aede, director of Environment Governance Institute in Uganda .
”CNOOC and TotalEnergies are destroying our country’s natural heritage and violating the rights of our people within the Lake Albert basin. Every right-thinking person has to resist these atrocities on Ugandans”, Aede said.
When operational, EACOP, the world’s longest heated crude oil pipeline at 1,443km, is expected to have a daily output of 246,000 barrels of oil. According to EACOP’s own environmental and social assessment report, more than 25,000 individuals in Uganda are affected by the EACOP project and over 200 households need to be resettled.
However, a European Parliament resolution on September 15, 2022 provides a much higher figure, estimating that more than 100,000 people in Tanzania and Uganda are at imminent risk of displacement because of the pipeline. The Parliament also foresees that many of the affected people will not receive proper guarantees of adequate compensation from the project developers.
“Disabled people and the elderly have been neglected in the land acquisition process as they were unable to travel to all the meetings with the pipeline companies”, continued Resare. “They claim they have not received compensation. Community members told us that the oil companies did not fully understand how many people’s livelihoods depend on each plot of land.”
As documented in Risk Of Poverty, comparable to other East African communities, farmland in Uganda is traditionally owned by men, but cultivated by women. The companies have mainly chosen to compensate men in the communities, excluding many women from planning resettlement for their households. When the money comes, the women never see it, according to interviews conducted by Just Finance International. In some cases, women were abandoned by partners after the payment of compensation.
According to Dickens Kamugisha, chief executive officer at the Ugandan NGO AFIEGO, which has provided legal help to communities affected by Uganda’s exploration of oil since 2013, the acquisition process has been unsatisfactory.
“Land-for-land compensation, with resettlement options, would have been a more appropriate approach than cash compensation since most of the affected people have limited or no formal education and are not financially literate. In many cases, people have misused the compensation and will have nowhere to go when the pipeline work begins”, he said.
Kamugisha says that the EACOP consortium is ignorant of how people in the countryside live and how they have survived for generations. If they would have done the due diligence EACOP could have used different methods for compensation.
“More research should have been done before the resettlement process started. The companies don’t take enough time to understand the culture and the way people live”, he added.Risk Of Poverty After Land Acquisitions For Uganda’s Mega Oil Pipeline
Contact:
Dave Walsh, Communications Advisor
Just Finance International
Mob: +34 691 826 764
press@justfinanceinternational.org
Samuel Aede, Director
Environment Governance Institute, Uganda
info@egiuganda
Mobile +256393242705
