Along the 1,443-kilometre route of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), the biggest infrastructure project in Uganda's history, the same complaint keeps surfacing in village after village: promised compensation arrived late, and when it arrived, it was not enough to buy back the life it was meant to replace.
The pipeline, majority-owned by France's TotalEnergies together with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and the governments of Uganda and Tanzania, will carry crude from the Lake Albert oilfields to the Tanzanian port of Tanga. To lay it, thousands of households across Hoima, Buliisa and Kikuube districts have had to give up land, farms and homes.
What the reports found
A December 2024 report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) documented continued labour-rights violations, environmental degradation and land-rights abuses across the Tilenga, Kingfisher and EACOP developments. In April 2025, The Guardian reported that many people displaced by the pipeline were inadequately rehoused or compensated, based on independent field research and named interviews with affected families.
Human Rights Watch, reporting from Kijumba and other project-affected villages, described mothers of five who waited years for payment and, when it came, could not afford to buy a substitute plot. Rights organisations have also documented growing deployment of security forces around project sites and pressure on the civil-society groups trying to accompany affected communities.
I ignorantly signed the documents consenting to free takeover of my land. Now the coffee is gone and the money never covered the trees.
The companies' response
TotalEnergies has consistently maintained that resettlement is being carried out in line with International Finance Corporation performance standards and that grievance mechanisms are open to affected residents. CNOOC has pointed to community investment in schools, clinics and roads in the Kingfisher project area. Both companies dispute the framing of the independent reports.
The lived experience along the pipeline route tells a more complicated story. It is that gap - between an internationally compliant paper trail and the household ledger of a Buliisa smallholder - that Uganda's regulators, and the project's international lenders, will ultimately be judged on.
- Oil in Uganda: Serious human rights abuses and escalating threats as project development enters new phase - FIDH (International Federation for Human Rights)
- Uganda: Oil Pipeline Project Impoverishes Thousands - Human Rights Watch
- People displaced by Uganda oil pipeline received inadequate compensation - The Guardian
