Ugandan villages still contest land titles as oil development advances
Fifteen years of unresolved ownership disputes around the Albertine basin have sharpened as TotalEnergies and the Ugandan state press ahead, leaving displaced communities uncertain what they are owed.
Communities living above Uganda's Albertine oil reserves remain unsure who holds title to the land they farm, fifteen years after the first disputes opened, according to reporting by Jeune Afrique.
The magazine describes a rush for oil that has hardened long-running conflicts over ownership rather than settling them. Households that were told their land would be acquired have in many cases neither moved nor received final settlement, leaving them in a prolonged state of uncertainty about whether to plant, build or wait.
TotalEnergies and the Ugandan government sit on one side of these disputes, and the affected communities on the other. The phrase quoted in the reporting, that oil is a curse, reflects how residents in the area have come to describe an industry that arrived with promises of transformation and instead produced a long administrative limbo.
The underlying problem is one of documentation. Much rural land in Uganda is held under customary tenure, recognised in law but frequently unaccompanied by the paperwork that a compulsory acquisition process demands. When a project requires formal title in order to compensate an owner, households whose claim rests on generations of occupation rather than on a certificate can find that claim difficult to convert into payment.
Communities living above Uganda's Albertine oil reserves remain unsure who holds title to the land they farm, fifteen years after the first disputes opened, according to reporting by Jeune Afrique.
That gap is where fifteen years of dispute has accumulated. A family unable to prove ownership to an acquiring authority's satisfaction may be offered less than a neighbour with documents, or may see its claim contested by another party entirely. Resolving each case individually is slow, and the slowness itself becomes a cost borne by the household rather than by the project.
The Albertine developments are among the largest industrial undertakings in Uganda's history, and the government has consistently presented them as the foundation of a new phase of national growth. The reporting sets that framing against the position of the people physically closest to the fields, for whom the visible result so far has been unresolved paperwork.
Disputes of this kind are not unique to Uganda. Extractive projects across the continent have repeatedly encountered the mismatch between customary tenure and the documentary requirements of large-scale acquisition, and the pattern of delay, partial compensation and contested claims recurs wherever that mismatch is not addressed before construction begins.
What the Ugandan case illustrates is how long the resulting uncertainty can persist. Fifteen years is long enough for the children of the original claimants to reach adulthood on land whose ownership was never settled, and long enough for the question of what the communities are owed to become harder rather than easier to answer.
Based on reporting by Jeune Afrique.
