The maiden article of these series, published on Monday, captured complaints by locals and leaders in northern Uganda that the government has neglected oil-related issues raised by the sub-region yet it’s home to a considerable amount of Uganda’s 6.5 billion barrels of oil.
The leaders said the government has, instead, favoured the Bunyoro sub-region. In Part II of these series, BENON HERBERT OLUKA visits Bunyoro’s oil districts of Hoima and Buliisa to assess whether the complaints are legitimate: –
The 92-kilometre drive from Hoima town to Kaiso-Tonya on the shores of Lake Albert, where the Kingfisher oil field is located, is one of the smoothest that a Ugandan can enjoy.
Costing $125 million (about Shs 450 billion), the two-lane road has extensive shoulders for motorcycle riders (boda bodas) and cyclists, as well as paved walkways for pedestrians.
Yoramu Nsamba, the former principal private secretary to the Omukama of Bunyoro, says the Hoima-Kaiso-Tonya road has eased travel to the oil fields below the rift valley escarpment, which were previously only accessible by air.
“I was able to drive down to Kaiso [from Hoima] within an hour because [the distance across] the rift valley has been reduced. Before [the construction of the paved road], climbing that hill would take you three or four hours,” he told The Observer recently.
Stephen Rwamukaga, the LC I chairman for Buhuka village, says the road has already changed the livelihood of some people in his community. “Because the road has been constructed, more people are coming here,” he said. “They have brought more business to the area.”
The Hoima-Kaiso-Tonya road is just one of several roads the government will tarmac in the Albertine region. According to plans from the Uganda National Roads Authority (Unra), in the next five years, the government will upgrade at least 500 kilometres of roads in the Bunyoro sub-region.
These include the Fort Portal-Bundibugyo-Semliki road; Masindi-Kigumba-Hoima; Kabwoya-Kyenjojo; Kyenjojo-Hoima-Masindi-Kigumba; Hoima-Wanseko and Masindi-Bukakata.
The assistant commissioner for refining in the energy ministry, Dozith Abeinomugisha, describes the roads as part of the “support infrastructure” that the area will need in order to ease oil production activities.
“The roads must be developed and we have been in discussions with the ministry of works to ensure that the roads are developed,” he said, adding that they are also developing a master plan involving other critical infrastructure. The master plan is expected to be in place early 2017.
In addition, there is an industrial park in the works, which will comprise an international airport, a refinery, an oil central processing facility,a storage hub, export hub, petro-chemical industries, an oil waste management plant, and at least two hydro-electricity projects.
LOCALS UNIMPRESSED
But not even this wide array of developments impresses some locals such as Topher Irumba, a resident of Hoima town. Irumba fears that from what he has observed, most locals will not benefit from the developments because the system was rigged to exclude natives of the Bunyoro sub-region.
“They are compensating people for land [to be used for the various developments but if you look critically, the beneficiaries are not Banyoro,” he said. “They are [immigrants like] Alurs and Acholis and people who came from Kampala. They knew much earlier what would happen; so, they came, bought land cheaply and, when compensation [time] came, they are the people who benefitted. The impact on us is very little.”
Nsamba shares Irumba’s view. Using the Hoima-Kaiso-Tonya road to illustrate his argument, Nsamba said he does not see ordinary people in Bunyoro making the most of the improved infrastructure. The reason, he says, is largely due to a failure by the government and oil companies to educate the people about opportunities the oil industry will bring.
“Whether people are benefiting from that good road, I am not sure because other necessary things have not been made to empower people to benefit. Okay, a road can be there but they need to also put other things in place; say, a means of livelihood with the capacity to invest. The investment capital and so on, these things are lacking. So, there is a good road we look at every day, we move on every day but that road is not yet an engine for development,” he argued.
Instead of benefits, Irumba says the only visible results so far are the repercussions of mismanagement of some initiatives that should have minimised the negative effects of oil exploration on Bunyoro.
However, the acting head of the directorate of Petroleum at the ministry of energy and mineral development, Robert Kasande, told The Observer that the government had already made a number of interventions.
“We are working with GIZ [German international development agency] to train people at artisan level, people who will work as heavy goods drivers. We are training people who will be able to do welding, which is very, very key in our industry, and also scaffolding,” he said.
According to Kasande, the government is also helping institutions in Hoima and Masindi districts, such as St Simon’s Vocational Institute and the Uganda Petroleum Institute in Kigumba, to develop capacity to train people. Government will further train entrepreneurs, especially in agriculture, to produce for the industry.
HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS
Few juxtapositions illustrate the oil-generated battles between the haves and have-nots that have ensued in the Bunyoro sub-region than the 225 families (comprising some 1,051 individuals) and two businessmen who evicted them from nearly 450 acres of land.
On August 25, 2014, the two businessmen, Joshua Tibagwa and Robert Bansigaraho, teamed up to evict the families from the land they were occupying as customary owners. According to the area local councillor, Nelson Tich, the duo processed land titles and violently drove the hapless families from the land, which they sold to an investor for a waste disposal management plant.
“These people were customary owners of the land. They were born on that land and grew up from there but they did not have land titles. They had stayed there for so long – for more than 30 years. Even Tibagwa came to acquire land when they were there already,” he said.
Members of the evicted community currently live in an internally-displaced persons’ camp in Rwamutonga Bugambe sub county, on land volunteered to them by a good Samaritan. Their chairman, Alex Latim, says their attempts to reclaim the land through the courts have so far not borne fruit. In the meantime, according to Latim, they have spent the last two years living in squalor and deprivation.
“We have six toilets but they are not enough because the people here are so many,” he revealed. “Our children fall sick a lot. When they fall sick, the health centre is far, about four miles. We do not have boda boda to take them. We are stuck.”
Winnie Ngabiirwe, the executive director of Global Rights Alert, a civil society organisation working to promote good governance of Uganda’s natural resources, told The Observer that land wrangles, especially between private persons or entities, are rampant.
“The whole Albertine region is having lots of land issues. [As a result], there are at least five internally-displaced persons’ (IDP) camps in Bunyoro,” she said.
The government, Ngabiirwe argues, should have set up systems and mechanisms to deal with land matters rather than leaving poor people to fight it out in the courts when they are unlikely to have the resources for the high cost of hiring lawyers.
“Going to court should have been the last resort. It is one way of frustrating peasants [from seeking justice],” she said. “The ministry of energy, the land board and the area land committees need to do their work to very quickly resolve these conflicts and to stop processing fraudulent titles.”
Ngabiirwe, however, credits the Hoima local government for sorting out the problems at the district land office, where she says rampant corruption had led to widespread processing of the fraudulent land titles used to grab land.
The government is acquiring 29 square kilometres for the refinery and, according to the energy ministry’s Abeinomugisha, most related land issues have been dealt with transparently.
“As of now, we have compensated about 98 per cent of the project-affected persons whose land we are taking,” he said. “The remaining two per cent have not been compensated, but these are the people who either didn’t show up or have contested the rates that they were given; so, we are trying to see how this can be resolved.”
According to Abeinomugisha, for those who opted to be relocated to other places, the government is building for them houses, which he said “are at 80 per cent completion.”
“By the end of this month or next month [January], the houses should be complete and by the end of February, these people should be able to move into their houses,” he said.
HISTORICAL INJUSTICES
In the week I spent in Bunyoro, a fierce battle raged between the police and army on one side, and an agitated group of locals who were being evicted from gazetted forest land by the National Forestry Authority (NFA).
On two occasions in Buhuka sub-county, NTV journalist Emmanuel Mutaizibwa and I were chased away by a group of locals carrying pangas and bows and arrows. They declined interview requests and, instead, accused us of being part of a government conspiracy to evict them from the land. They pointed their bows and arrows at us and threatened to shoot if we didn’t leave.
Irumba said such incidents demonstrate the pent-up anger that the people in Bunyoro feel against the government which, he said, has continued the policy of discriminating against the sub-region.
“There is no difference between this government and the British government which suppressed us the Banyoro. There is no difference. We are still being suppressed,” he said.
The former Omuhikirwa (prime minister) of Bunyoro kingdom, Elisa Kagoro Byenkya, told The Observer that the marginalisation of their sub-region is “historical,” and stems from the time Bunyoro kingdom fought against British imperialists.
“When the British came here, they were resisted by Kabalega [so] they began a deliberate policy to take our land away from us. For example, Kibaale was given to the people who helped the British come here and fight us, the Baganda. What remained, still the British worked out a policy of trying to alienate the Banyoro from their land. They refused to give us titles. In Bunyoro there were no individual titles,” the retired kingdom official explained.
Another result of those injustices, according to Byenkya, was that the British government gazetted a lot of the land in Bunyoro as national forests in order to deny locals the chance to own it. In addition, he argued, they went slow on constructing infrastructure such as hospitals, roads and schools.
“Some of us who studied during those times had to go out of Bunyoro to get good secondary education. I went to Sir Samuel Baker in Gulu for my O-level and A-level in 1958,” he said.
In 2004, Bunyoro kingdom threatened to sue the British Monarchy (in particular the Queen of England) for alleged atrocities committed by its soldiers during the colonial period. Bunyoro wanted compensation worth £3 trillion.
But according to Byenkya, even after Uganda gained political independence from the British, the subsequent governments continued implementing some of the unfair policies, either deliberately or not.
“All post-independence governments have not helped Banyoro,” he said. “Our case is unique and they should really have taken the trouble to first of all study this case and see how they should have helped us to bring us at par with the rest of Uganda.”
hobenon@observer.ug
In the third and final part of these series, we look at the likely way forward out of these grievances.
This story is a product of The Watchdog, a centre for investigative journalism at The Observer. It was written as part of the Wealth of Nations programme, a media skills development programme run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in partnership with the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME).
