Allegations of sexual violence, forced evictions, and environmental harm have engulfed a major oil venture in Uganda operated by French company TotalEnergies and China’s CNOOC, according to climate activists on Monday.
The $10 billion initiative involves oil drilling in the Lake Albert area in northwestern Uganda and constructing a 1,443-kilometer heated pipeline to transport the oil to Tanzania’s Indian Ocean port of Tanga.
Climate Rights International (CRI), a non-profit organisation, interviewed numerous residents to compile a report detailing a series of abuses at the Kingfisher project.
CRI’s executive director Brad Adams expressed dismay, stating that rather than bringing prosperity to the people of Uganda, the Kingfisher project—operated and co-owned by CNOOC and predominantly owned by TotalEnergies—has left them vulnerable to violence, coercion, and impoverishment.
According to the report, inhabitants of villages in the Kingfisher area recounted being forcibly evicted, often with minimal or no notice, by the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF).
Residents claimed that they were instructed to vacate and had to flee with whatever they could carry. Some homes were vacated or, in certain cases, demolished.
Climate Rights International noted that many residents disclosed facing threats, coercion, and intimidation when they questioned or opposed CNOOC’s acquisition of their land.
Families also reported being pressured and intimidated by TotalEnergies’ Ugandan subsidiary officials and subcontractors into accepting insufficient compensation that did not enable them to acquire replacement land.
Since the arrival of CNOOC and the military, fishing boats—the primary economic activity in the region—are regularly confiscated or destroyed by the army if they do not comply with new regulations prohibiting smaller vessels, the report mentioned.
CRI revealed that “numerous women” recounted experiences of sexual violence resulting from “threats, intimidation, or coercion by soldiers in the Kingfisher Project area.”
The non-profit also received reports of sexual violence involving “managers and superiors within oil companies operating at Kingfisher, including one case involving a CNOOC employee.”
Regarding environmental harm, two individuals who had worked for China Oilfields Services Limited, a drilling service contractor, informed CRI that their former supervisor, a Chinese national, instructed them to release contaminated water from the drilling rig directly into the lake or vacant land.
TotalEnergies has previously stated that those displaced by the oil project have been adequately compensated, and measures have been implemented to safeguard the environment.
Uganda’s first oil is anticipated to start flowing in 2025, and President Yoweri Museveni hails the project as an economic windfall for the landlocked country, where numerous people live in poverty.
