Oil and gas sector; Speed and rush vs basic rights of communities

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OPINION

By Bbiira Kiwanuka Nassa

In November 2025, at the invitation of Nature Talk Africa (NaTa), I facilitated a training for 42 community grassroots human rights defenders selected from across the Albertine region. In my training, I used reflection and therefore kept on asking participants a series of questions.

What lashed me most was when I asked them, “How different were they from other non-oil-producing districts?”.

The feedback seemed to imply that the big infrastructures as a result of the oil and gas, had injured communities and also created noticeable marks on each of them. This is in addition to the same infrastructures such as the good roads, international airport, Hoima city stadium and others, creating a better state of life for communities. From the aged to the youths, all human rights defenders in the region expressed, physically and emotionally, looked so depressed, fatigued and angered. One of the participants noted that, “we hoped to be in the promised land. But the oil and gas sector rather delivered us to a devastating life prison.”

There have been deliberate efforts to silence reason, compromise the common good, and the agenda is run by international oil and gas companies with great support from government agencies responsible for policing and regulating the Ugandan oil project.

The community leaders, like Local Governments and national Ministries, Departments and Agencies linked to the oil and gas sector for Uganda, rather play a public relations and policing role rather than advocating for the common interests of the communities.

Communities have been classified by the oil and gas sector and its stakeholders as being for and against the sector. Government agencies like the Petroleum Authority of Uganda play a dominant and controlling role. There is no clearly known actor or agency appreciating the need to facilitate citizen engagement. What is done is a mock, and they also know that it’s a sham, as it is designed to cover up public perception and mitigate immediate resistance to the projects.

All stakeholder engagement efforts are persuasive and ascendancy rather than focusing on the empowerment of communities. 

As such, all voices of reason in any matter regarding Uganda’s extractive sector have been played rather than engaged with. For this reason, the more silent the communities are, the happier those manning the oil and gas actors get.

There is anguish amongst communities. For example, whereas the Bunyoro hosts great infrastructures like the Tilenga and Kingfisher Development Area, close to one hundred oil wells, two central Processing Facilities, out of the 9 districts, more than 60% have no district hospitals. These include Hoima, Kikuube and Hoima city, which are the primary hosts for the major oil and gas activities. Despite hosting the primary social impacts of the oil and gas sector, Hoima city has no any program to prepare the population for the current and future sector-facilitated challenges and induced opportunities.

Therefore, communities still consider themselves as spectators in the oil and gas sector. Worst still, the quality of stakeholder engagement has remained a dominant, biased, judgmental and one-sided one. For example, there is no any community that has a community development program that the oil and gas sector contributes to.

As such, citizens and leaders are compelled to align to the framework of the International Oil Companies instead of the oil companies aligning their initiatives to the local community needs or community development frameworks. My analysis has tried to look at local actors like the private sector, who on the surface appear to have been dealing in lucrative petroleum business deal. None can be called successful as much as they have parasitically been engaged.

Others who had successful business pathways are already limping. The tax man has also made them spend on compliance rather than building enduring, sustainable business models. At the community level, the oil and gas sector planted a seed of non-negotiable engagement whereby whoever dares to ask important questions regarding compensation, equity, land, human rights, community benefits, environment, noise, Lake Albert or even community social license, is deemed anti-sector, anti-government, if not anti-development.

This nurtured an unhappy, compliant, disinterested, unbothered community and silent sector spectators or participants. It also isolated human rights defenders and communities, as those in favour (those who do not ask questions) and those deemed critical of the sector (those who question every sector process). As such, a community of silent, unhappy voices whose rights are abused by sector processes and whose participation is deemed a privilege has emerged. These communities are delinked from any sector processes. This situation is a result of two reasons.

First, the oil and gas sector over policed its activities by way of engaging actors as though they were enemies of the state or the oil and gas industry. The second reason was biased engagement where project schemes only targeted the directly project-affected persons (PAPs) and neglected project project-affected communities.

Therefore, in all sector processes, communities have remained onlookers, passengers and spectators. As per October 2025, there were no oil and gas operations or installations that were not guarded either by a private security firm or the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF). This insecure mindset from the government and IOCs communicates that the state (and oil companies) fear communities and communities do not love or consider the sector installations as being of value to them.

The common good is not communicated at all by either the communities or the state and its private sector. If we are to guarantee a better future, more engagements that build trust and long-term relationships of mutual benefits between the state and private sector on one hand and the communities on the other hand should be built.

Communities may need a deliberate community development program that is not isolated to only Project Affected Persons but is embodied in their needs and aspirations. The oil and gas sector must contribute to the common good, like equipping or supporting critical sectors like schools and health facilities in the region. Lest of this, communities will resist the oil project, and it will be too costly to police it throughout its project lifetime.

The writer is the executive director; Recreation for Development and Peace Uganda (RDP Uganda) and an independent peace-building expert