Ugandan Families Left in Limbo as Oil Project Earmarks Land
Farmers
say the long-delayed project has put limits on how they can use their land and
failed to pay promised compensation
Two years ago, surveyors came
to measure a swathe of land cutting through the Bitamale family’s homestead in
western Uganda.
The family was not sure whether
the land acquisition in their village in Buliisa district was for a road or a
pipeline, but they knew it was connected to a multibillion-dollar oil project
coming to the low plain beside Lake Albert.
“The surveyors told us we
shouldn’t use the land where they passed,” Violet Bitamale told the Thomson
Reuters Foundation, indicating an invisible line between a nearby tree and the
house of her adult son.
But since then, nobody has come
to develop the land and the family has received no compensation fo...