WANSEKO — Seeing elephants in the small fishing village of Wanseko, Uganda, used to be extremely rare. But in recent months, incursions have multiplied, and with them, the damage of crops and attacks on people.
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Something is scaring these animals inland, in the Murchison Falls National Park, and is pushing them into new territories on the shores of Lake Mwitanzige, a large body of water that is part of the Nile’s complex system and is connected to Lake Victoria.
In Wanseko and the other communities around the park, people know what is scaring the elephants, because it is the same thing they have been fighting for years: the Tilenga oil project.
Tilenga involves the development of six oil and gas fields in the districts of Buliisa and Nwoya (one of them located in the Murchison Falls National Park itself) and the drilling of some 400 wells. The project is being promoted by French company TotalEnergies, which holds 56.6% of the operation, and the state oil companies of China (CNOOC) and Uganda (UNOC). They are all also collaborating on the Kingfisher project, south of the lake.
According to TotalEnergies, total reserves for both projects represent more than 1 billion barrels of oil. And both projects are closely linked to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), a gigantic 900 mile pipeline that will carry fossil fuels to the port of Tanga in Tanzania for export.
If all three projects are carried out, more than 118,000 people will be displaced from their homes, and many others will suffer consequences on their land. Once operational, they will emit 34 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, more than half of what Uganda alone generates annually, according to estimates by the NGO Friends of the Earth.
The upside of these projects, according to TotalEnergies, is that they will create around 80,000 direct and indirect jobs, and will allow Uganda and Tanzania to take advantage of their own resources and invest the profits in their development.
Yet so far, the processing and early stages of the projects have left a long trail of threats and human rights violations, both to local communities and to activists and defenders of the land and the environment.
It’s the kind of story we don’t think about when we step on the accelerator of our gasoline-powered cars. But it is one that demonstrates the exploitation, destruction and pollution of an economic system based on fossil fuels.
Pressure and intimidation
Tilenga’s first well was drilled in June 2023. By then, most of the infrastructure surrounding the oil fields was already under construction, including an industrial zone in the Bulisa District, where the extracted materials will be treated to clean the crude.
TotalEnergies, CNOOC and UNOC aim to start producing oil next year and then continue to increase production. To do so, of course, they need the pipeline that will allow them to get the fossil fuels out of Africa and to the countries where they will be consumed. The deployment of the pipeline itself has not yet begun, but the purchase of lands and building of the infrastructure are already well advanced – you can see the current status of the work on an interactive map by Friends of the Earth.
Farmers have faced pressure and intimidation to sign agreements that were not in their favor.
“The land acquisition process was a disaster and has led to food insecurity and household debt in the area. The compensation for those who have lost their land has been delayed for years and, in many cases, has not been sufficient,” says Myrto Tilianaki, a senior advocate for the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), which published last year an in-depth report on the human rights violations committed to date to move forward on the EACOP project.
“We have evidence that farmers have faced pressure and intimidation to sign agreements that were not in their favor. Furthermore, these agreements were always in English, so most did not fully understand what they were signing,” Tilianaki says. “Moreover, over the years, anyone who has protested against the expansion of fossil fuel operations in Uganda, from NGOs to local activists, has faced pressure of all kinds from the government and the police.”
According to the HRW report, pressures range from preventing communications with the media or funding police raids, to confiscating materials and arresting people without motives. To date, more than a hundred people protesting or having protested against the pipeline in Uganda have been arrested under all kinds of pretexts.
Protesters arrested
“They want us to be afraid. We are protesting peacefully, they arrest us and put us in jail for two or three days without telling us anything,” says Dickens Kamugisha, director of the African Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), one of the organizations leading the protests on the ground.
“Local communities are also afraid. It is true that many people have received compensation because their land has been affected by the project, but no one tells you under what conditions, under what pressures. These are people whose land is the only thing they have, and if you threaten to take it away from them, they will eventually accept anything you give them in return. Resisting the power of TotalEnergies, the police and the Ugandan government is difficult. The conditions are very hostile,” Kamugisha adds.
Juliette Renaud of Friends of the Earth says the situation is even more worrying in Tanzania, where there is more state control and pressure on social organizations and human rights defenders.
Addressing the situation, the HRW report recommends that TotalEnergies clearly inform the Ugandan government that it will not tolerate threats to human rights defenders working on oil issues. The company claims to be in touch with local authorities, although it has not yet communicated its position to higher levels of the administration.
“We believe that activists should have the opportunity to engage in constructive dialogue in order to achieve lasting peaceful solutions to conflicts,” TotalEnergies has stated. “However, although freedom of assembly is a right, protesters must also comply with the laws of the country.”
Environmental concerns
The deforestation and the infrastructure built around the first extraction wells in Tilenga are already producing dire consequences. Beyond the elephant incursions in nearby villages, farmers complain that flooding in the area is much more severe than before; now there are no more forests to retain the water or the sediment it carries.
And this is just the beginning: Uganda’s oil development and the construction of what will be one of the longest oil pipelines in the world will affect territories with great biodiversity, multiply the risk of contamination in protected wetlands and alter the migratory routes of many species, among other environmental consequences.
The analysis Spanish NGO Ecologists in Action published on the environmental and social impact assessment of the project indicates that the risks of oil spills in the Nile basin and Lake Victoria are very high, especially considering that the pipeline will cross the Rift Valley, an area of high seismic activity.
An oil spill would not only have a direct impact on fauna and flora, but would compromise the freshwater reserves of one of the most important basins in Africa. In addition, as the organization points out, no contingency plan or action measures exist to date in the event of a spill along the pipeline.
Leading scientific bodies and climate change experts are calling for all new fossil fuel projects to be frozen.
Finally, there are the greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Roadmap report, updated last year, indicates that to avoid the worst effects of climate change and contain global warming, the development of new oil, gas and coal projects must be stopped completely.
According to calculations by the Climate Accountability Institute, the Tilenga and pipeline projects will emit at least 379 million tons of CO2 equivalent throughout their entire service life.
“EACOP and Uganda’s oil development projects are being carried out at a time when leading scientific bodies and climate change experts are calling for all new fossil fuel projects to be frozen if we want to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goals,” HRW’s Tilianaki explains. “The construction of these projects not only has a direct impact on people’s lives, their livelihoods and their direct environment, but it condemns us to a kind of carbon lock-in, ensuring years and years of greenhouse gas emissions.”
TotalEnergies assures that it is “fully committed to the transition to clean energy, but global demand for oil remains high.” “These projects in Uganda and Tanzania make it possible to secure oil production for 20 years and the transportation to bring the fuel to the market. Both countries expect the benefits of oil production to financially support their national development. Not allowing them to develop their own resources would mean denying access to development to those who need it most. The energy transition must also be socially acceptable.”
Legal challenges
The demonstrations and protests in Uganda and Tanzania have been echoed in France, where TotalEnergies has its headquarters. A first lawsuit, filed in France by AFIEGO, Friends of the Earth and four other organizations in 2019, was rejected for being inadmissible. But the fight in court did not stop there.
“We started a new action in June last year. The plaintiffs are 26 members of the communities affected by Tilenga and EACOP in Uganda, the human rights defender Maxwell Atuhura and five French and Ugandan organizations,” explains Friends of the Earth’s Renaud. “But justice is slow and we only recently received the first written response from TotalEnergies. We hope to have a date for the first hearing in 2025.”
There is also another lawsuit underway at the East African Court of Justice. This lawsuit, filed by the Centre for Food and Adequate Living Rights (Uganda), AFIEGO (Uganda), Natural Justice (Kenya) and the Centre for Strategic Litigation (Tanzania), is directed at the governments of Uganda and Tanzania and the Secretary General of the East African Community, and is based on the alleged non-compliance with regional economic, environmental and human rights regulations by the oil development projects.
A risky project
Yet lawsuits are not the biggest obstacle the project faces at the moment. The construction of the pipeline will cost around billion, but less than billion has been committed so far. And growing number of insurers are reluctant to back the risks of the project.
“Many financial institutions and insurance companies are hesitant, with 28 insurers already saying they will not participate because of the pressure from activists and the risks involved,” says AFIEGO Director Kamugisha.
According to the BankTrack organization, which regularly produces financial risk reports on the project and has become a major source of pressure for banks, credit institutions and insurers, the risks of the project on the environment, society and basic human rights are too high for most financial institutions.
Ugandans know that these oil projects will not be socially, economically and environmentally relevant.
According to its latest report, local companies do not have the capacity to insure the full risk of the project, so the lack of support from foreign insurance companies is putting the long-term viability of the pipeline at risk.
While TotalEnergies, CNOOC, UNOC and the governments of Uganda and Tanzania continue to try to push the project forward, local organizations are not giving up.
“Ugandans know that these oil projects will not be socially, economically and environmentally relevant and that they are no longer attractive to financial companies,” concludes Kamugisha. “And we will continue to be there, protesting, supporting young people and local communities, engaging the judiciary and putting pressure on the government and oil companies to ensure that our critical ecosystems are protected and that people’s lives are truly improved.”
