In an unfinished church in Biso, a town in western Uganda, in January last year, dozens of villagers gathered on rough wooden benches, anxiously awaiting updates from their lawyer. Women huddled together in a corner on the right, a few cattle-keeping men sat apart with their herding sticks, and children crammed outside the door.
Everyone shared the same grievance. Two years earlier, on 10 February 2023, hundreds of people in Kapaapi and Runga, two neighbouring villages, had awoken to the sound of gunshots, the screams of their neighbours and the smell of their thatched roofs burning.
The villagers believed the attacks had been orchestrated by a network of private developers and political and military elites, who had conspired to violently seize ancestral land from over 500 families in Hoima District. Their motivation? A cut of the oil rush brought by the impending East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), Uganda’s first new oil pipeline since commercially viable oil deposits were confirmed in the region in 2006.
That February night, villagers told openDemocracy, dozens of men arrived in Kapaapi and Runga on roaring motorcycles and trucks to announce that the families were being evicted and their land taken “on behalf of the president”. The men wore khaki uniforms resembling those of the Magnum Security Company, a private firm, and were accompanied by soldiers from the Ugandan army, known as the Uganda People’s Defence Forces, and local council officials, villagers said. The men burnt down houses, stole livestock and even raped the women of the village.
Two weeks later, the displaced villagers held a meeting with Uganda’s minister for lands, Judith Nabakooba, who ordered that they return to their land. Assured of their safety under a ministerial order, the locals whose homes had not been burnt down returned to them. That same night, they were again allegedly attacked by soldiers and Magnum security officers, who beat up the residents and set more of their homes on fire.
Today, those affected still live in makeshift shelters, tarpaulins on rented plots and school buildings in what’s left of their villages or in neighbouring districts. Most rely on well-wishers for food, and their children are out of school. Some suffer from untreated injuries, hypertension, and trauma.
“We lost everything,” said Joyce, a mother of seven.
How Hoima got here
The promise of oil wealth has transformed western Uganda, particularly places like Hoima city, the administrative headquarters of the district that bears the same name. New tarmacked ‘oil roads’ snake in and out of the town, humming with fuel tankers and government convoys, and a heavy military presence shadows the activity as armoured trucks are a familiar sight along the main roads.
Forty minutes from Hoima, life appears to have returned to normal in the village of Kapapi. Gardens of maize, cassava, and sweet potatoes stretch between grass-thatched huts and semi-permanent homes. Herds of long-horned Ankole cows graze. But the calm is deceptive. The villagers say the land on which their cows roam now officially belongs to the men who displaced them, while other swathes of contested land remain sealed off, guarded by military men. A few kilometres away, in Runga, a newly carved 30-metre-wide feeder road slices across the disputed land where the new oil pipeline will soon pass.
The discovery of commercially viable oil in Uganda’s Albertine Graben region in the mid-Noughties triggered a rush for land, leading to subsequent land wrangles and conflicts, which left residents under the communal land tenure system particularly vulnerable to illegal evictions. The rush intensified with the announcement of the new pipeline, which is expected to be operational from October this year and will be the world’s longest heated crude oil pipeline, transporting Ugandan crude oil from Kabaale in Hoima to the Chongoleani peninsula in Tanzania.
The key investors in EACOP, the entity that owns the pipeline, are French multinational giant TotalEnergies; CNOOC Ltd, a subsidiary of the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation; the Uganda National Oil Company; and the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation. The EACOP entity itself is registered in an office in London’s Canary Wharf business district. Earlier this month, Ugandan farmers and environmental activists opposed to the pipeline announced they were launching a last-minute legal bid to stop its construction in the British courts. In a press statement released earlier this year, their lawyers from London law firm Leigh Day said: “The fact that the pipeline is operated and financed by a UK-registered company highlights the role UK corporates often have in fossil fuel extraction projects in the Global South.”
While the pipeline will not pass directly through Kapaapi, the value of the land the village sits on will likely increase due to the increased economic activity it will bring to the area, with new roads and settlements. Richard Orebi, a land lawyer who focuses on land disputes in the Albertine Graben region, told openDemocracy that such huge development projects cause an uptick in land grabs as people in government use their access to knowledge that is not yet public to obtain swathes of land for financial gain.
“People within the government are likely to know of a planned key government project in a certain area, and acquire the land there, or forcefully take it. Then later on, you will see out of nowhere, the government is coming saying we want to implement a certain project in this area,” said Orebi.
Uganda has no law against public officials using insider information to acquire such properties.
The pipeline project has triggered a familiar cycle of corruption, violence and backroom dealing: land grabs like the one in Runga and Kapaapi typically involve three groups of people working together, Oribe told openDemocracy. “Firstly, the greedy local businesspeople living within the community who are more well off compared to the people they’re living with, then come the elected community leaders with the stamp, and then come those with state power and backing.”
The pipeline has added significance in light of the US-Israeli war on Iran and subsequent blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of the world’s total oil and liquified natural gas passes. “Energy hungry or energy recipient” countries will start looking to Africa in the medium to long-term, geopolitical risk consulting expert Ikemesit Effiong of SBM Intelligence told openDemocracy.
The Hormuz blockade, Effiong said, has demonstrated the need for countries to look for oil outside the Gulf; African oil producers such as Uganda may be best placed to profit from this outcome. With significant economic advantages on the line, Effiong reckons the concerns of local communities such as evicted Hoima residents will, unfortunately, continue to take a backseat.
Other analysts have cautioned that Uganda should learn from the mistakes of its oil-rich African counterparts like Nigeria, for whom unregulated oil exploration, ill treatment and disregard of nearby communities resulted in political instability in its oil-rich regions years after the fact; as well as environmental degradation. The impasse in the Gulf will not result in immediate gains for Uganda, said Tobi Omorodion, senior associate, shipping & commercial at Shoreline, as oil from new producers like Uganda will “not immediately shape the global supply balance”.
“Future energy relationships (between Africa and the West and Asia) will be defined around reliability and trust, not just price,” said Indian economist and Bloomberg columnist, Mihir Sharma. “Uganda, if it is to invest in new export infrastructure, will have to line up exploration capital – which is hard, given that rebuilding damaged facilities in the Gulf will cost tens of billions of dollars, soaking up a lot of the excess cash in the sector.”
A timeline of dispossession
Most of the evicted families in the two villages belong to the cultivator or pastoralist communities who can trace their occupation of the lands back decades, with some having been born there and inherited their land from their grandparents. Yet they don’t hold the official land titles.
Over 68% of Uganda’s total land is held under the customary system, in which land ownership, rights and usage are decided according to the customs, traditions and norms of a specific community. Registering for the land ownership certificates is uncommon due to the cost and complexity of the process.
Joyce’s husband, Eriya Murega, is a pastoralist whose family occupied over 100 acres that were freely allocated by the local community and Local Council 1 chairpersons in 2002. “We didn’t buy it. We were introduced and shown where to graze,” he said.
Despite the supposed legal recognition, customary land owners are vulnerable to land grabs. The land from which the Kapaapi and Runga villagers were evicted appears to have changed ownership under murky circumstances without their knowledge.
In 2008, a freehold title for the pastoralist land was obtained by several politically connected individuals, including local businessmen Gafayo Ndawula William, Aston Muhwezi and Amooti Kamanywa Alex, as well as an army official, Major Khan Rwashande. It is unclear how a land title was issued to Rwashande, who had died two years earlier in a clash with armed cattle rustlers in Karamoja region.
Court documents seen by openDemocracy suggest William and Muhwezi used false names to acquire titles, with William appearing in land records as “Wamala William” and Muhwezi as “Anthony Bahuzya”. Muhwezi, a land surveyor, is believed to have played a role in the title processing and land demarcation.
“It appears to be a tactic to hide the truth from either the community or the authorities,” Oribe, the lawyer, said.
The neighbouring agricultural land was subject to a similar fate. Villagers say 700 acres of land, which was occupied by over 200 families, was fraudulently leased to Brigadier General Peter Nabasa, a senior army officer in the UPDF's first division, by Asiimwe Moses Byangire, who said his father had been issued a 49-year lease to the area by the Ministry of Lands in 1987. It is not known how his father was able to register the land, where there is evidence, including burial grounds, of cultivators having been settled for decades. The pastoralist community approached the district court, which ruled that the villagers could stay on the land until the dispute was settled.
But, villagers say, they were then subjected to a well-coordinated campaign by local authorities. Men from the community began to be picked up by the local police on trumped-up charges of theft.
“When one would hear about a man who had been taken, they’d hide. They began to pick them up one by one. No one was safe,” recalls Jolly, a pastoralist whose husband and brother-in-law were arrested at their home in Runga village in December 2022.
Shortly after the final meeting in January 2023, 13 men from Runga and Kapaapi were arrested and charged with stealing animals. Although theft is a bailable offence in Uganda, all were remanded in prison and refused a court hearing. A month later, Murega, Joyce’s husband, was arrested by local police along with two other men from their community.
A human rights lawyer representing the victims, Peter Arinaitwe, believes the arrests were politically motivated to ensure the men would be out of the way during the evictions. “This was a coordinated operation,” he told openDemocracy. The men were released without trial after the evictions, with the charges against them dropped due to a lack of evidence.
Total Energies did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment. But in a reply to a local publication, Witness Radio Uganda, the company said: “Both TotalEnergies EP Uganda (TEPU) and EACOP Ltd maintain their earlier position that no land eviction activities have been carried out by or on behalf of TEPU or EACOP Ltd.”
Legal pushback and interference
Since being brutally evicted from their villages, locals have tried to get justice.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a local member of parliament, David Karubanga, secured shelter for some of the evicted families at a school in Kapaapi but was later arrested by army officers at a meeting between the minister for lands and the displaced locals. While Karubanga was later released without charge or any formal reason for his arrest, the incident left villagers feeling defeated. “I gave up on the fight. I feared for my life and my children’s lives,” said Joyce.
Some locals tried to seek help directly from local authorities. Teopista*, a displaced villager, tried to report being raped during the evictions to the police, but was told that the district police commander, Patrick Bogere, had ordered her arrest. Other evicted women asked for help from the police, too, but were shuttled between several stations that refused to register their complaints.
Given the military’s involvement, the displaced women also made appeals to the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF). In October 2024, the Defence Intelligence and Security, an agency within the UPDF, invited the women to an interview where they say they were asked not about their evictions but why they were being antagonistic towards Nabasa, a top-ranking officer in the force.
The pastoralist and cultivator communities have so far filed six human rights enforcement actions and civil lawsuits over the evictions, which they say violated their constitutional right to own property and their freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Ajaruva Uchida, a key leader of the cultivator community in neighbouring Waaki, is seeking to privately bring criminal charges on behalf of the victims against William, the local businessman Nabasa, the senior army officer, Byangire, a local land tout, Magnum Security, the Hoima district land board, the Hoima district police commander, and local council officials for their involvement in the brutal evictions. Uchida filed the case at the constitutional court on behalf of the evicted people over two years ago in December 2023, but a date has not yet been set for a hearing.
Legal proceedings have been undermined at every stage. In October 2023, a fire mysteriously burned important archives at the Hoima High Court just as the victims’ lawyers sought certified copies of court orders proving their clients’ right to stay on the land until the rulings in subsequent cases are finalised.
Displaced, traumatised, but defiant
The plight of the Kapaapi and Runga villagers points to broader issues around who pays the price when state power and private interests converge. Uganda’s discovery of oil, which has been sold to the public as a path to prosperity, has instead deepened repression, dispossession, and violence against its most vulnerable citizens. The promise of oil development stands in stark contrast to the reality of the villagers.
Today, the women and their families are still suffering the trauma of the attacks. Teopista worries that being raped has jeopardised her standing as a wife and mother. “I fear my marriage may break up because I feel my husband may not respect me the same way,” she said. “I don’t have peace inside me, but as a mother, I get myself together because I have children to take care of.”
Still, the women are organising. They’ve formed support networks, are documenting their stories, and are pursuing justice despite the risks. Six women who were raped during the evictions also sought anonymity protections before the Hoima High Court in February 2024, ahead of a planned lawsuit against their attackers and the land-grabbers.
Their stories of survival, resistance, and courage cut through the web of deception and impunity surrounding Uganda’s oil frontier. And as the legal battles unfold, the looming question is whether oil interests, top military officers and well-connected businessmen will triumph over justice for these women and their families.
openDemocracy made several attempts to reach sources mentioned in the story for comment, including: Magnum Security Company, Ministry of Lands, Uganda, Ugandan People’s Defence Forces, East African Crude Oil Pipeline, and individuals Asiimwe Moses Byangire, Gafayo Ndawula William. We received no response.
