Marked for demolition? Ugandans on pipeline route from refinery fear land loss
HOIMA, Uganda (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Ugandan farmer James
The government is set to take about half of the land, which feeds Mubona’s 20 children and numerous grandchildren, to build the world’s longest electrically heated oil pipeline from northwest Uganda to Tanzania’s Tanga port on the Indian Ocean.
“I am worried because I don’t know where to go when this land is taken,”
“When the pipeline takes a bigger portion of your land and you remain with a small portion, what do you do with that small portion?”
Uganda discovered crude reserves estimated by government geologists at 6.5 billion barrels in the Albertine rift basin more than 10 years ago.
The east African country aims to refine crude oil domestically and export some via a 1,445-km (900-mile) pipeline through neighboring Tanzania by 2020.
An energy ministry official told Mubona that a chunk of his land will be used to run a 30-meter wide pipeline, road and power line from the refinery to the sea.
Uganda signed an agreement in April with a consortium, including a subsidiary of General Electric, to build and operate a 60,000-barrel-a-day refinery that will cost up to $4 billion, the president’s office said.
Yusuf Masaba, a spokesman for Uganda’s energy ministry, said the entire pipeline route had been mapped out and plans to compensate and resettle people were at an advanced stage.
“Once the government valuer is done with valuation, then compensation will be done. I cannot say when they will be compensated,” Masaba told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We are not going to break people’s homes to pass the line. There are no settlements in the areas that the pipeline is going to pass,” he said, emphasizing that the government is only going to acquire farmland, not houses.
EMPTY
More than 7,000 people were evicted from 13 neighboring villages in Hoima District in 2012 for the refinery and a new international airport, which will fly in oil equipment, according to the energy ministry.
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“I can’t live here,” said
“It looks like a camp and there is no privacy. All houses are so close together,” he said, gesturing at the two rows of houses, as construction workers in orange and red reflector jackets laid stones to build a police station in the midday sun.
Many families who have been resettled on the 530-acre plot complained that they could not keep livestock at the tightly-packed modern houses, unlike at their old rural homes, and that their new farmland was too far away, he said.
RED CROSSES
The families who chose cash compensation have not fared much better, activists said.
Innocent Tumwebaze, chairman of the Oil Refinery Residents Association, which represents evictees, said the 4.5 million shillings ($1,230) per acre compensation was too little to buy land in the same area.
“We were compensated using outdated rates,” he said, standing outside his house in Kyakaboga resettlement village.
“There is no one who is forced to take compensation they don’t agree to. We have a grievance mechanism and they can also go to court,” he said by phone.
Some men who received the cash, as the customary landowners, deserted their families and disappeared to towns, abandoning their wives and children, who are staying with relatives.
“Issues of compensation have broken up many families,” Tumwebaze said.
Back in Mubona’s village, red crosses, painted by government officials in April, mark the doors of five mud-walled houses.
“I was told that an oil pipeline is going to pass through here,” said Jacinta Kyomukama, 48, whose house is marked, adding that she is unsure whether to plant for the next season in case she is moved.
Masaba said the marks did not mean those houses would be demolished, as the pipeline’s final route has not been decided.
“I expect to be compensated and then go and buy land elsewhere,” said the mother of seven, as her grandchildren milled around her. “I don’t intend to go very far from here.”
Reporting by Kevin Mwanza; editing by Katy Migiro.
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