Tilenga: Not inviting Buliisa-based journalists for the final handover of homes to PAPs was deliberate

Op-Ed: On October 15, 2024, while TotalEnergies and the government of Uganda handed over the last batch of 100 resettlement houses to the Tilenga Project Affected Persons (PAPs), local radio journalists from Buliisa, for various reasons, were excluded from being part of the event.

The occasion, which was graced by the Hon. Phiona Nyamutoro, the Minister of State for Minerals, at Kimbabura Playground in Ngwendo Sub County, Buliisa district, was covered by journalists who came from far and wide, as far as the capital, Kampala.

Media houses from the neighboring Hoima, Kikuube, and Nwoya, among others, were equally invited and present.

I learned about the handover event from my friend, the Woman Member of Parliament, Hon. Norah Bigirwa. That evening, I kept my radio set tuned on Biiso FM to hear what our local leaders would say at the event, only to my dismay.

Later in our conversation, Hon. Norah was as surprised as I was that no local radio journalist from the host district was present to cover the event on behalf of the local community.

For the record, Biiso FM is the only native media house and the primary source of information for the greater population of Buliisa district. I was told by members of the radio newsroom that they were not invited for the event.

Now, those of us who have been drumming against deliberate exclusion of native communities in the critical affairs of the oil and gas industry do not find this surprising at all.

Recently, just about two months ago, I was on the list of 20 community members identified by the Bagungu Community Association (BACA) for the tour to check around what is taking place in the Tilenga oil fields on behalf of the local communities. TotalEnergies E&P Uganda suddenly started to play Ping-Pong.

They, unapologetically and with gross impunity, cancelled the tour three times and, at one point, notified us abruptly to prepare for the maiden tour in two days’ time before they eventually cancelled it permanently and converted it into a hotel boardroom meeting with a bunch of their junior officers. Well, they called it a stakeholders consultative meeting. Consulting the people whom they blocked to get real information from the field with which to engage them in the first place.

That is what it is. TEPU engages the local community for ceremonial purposes and to legitimize their agenda. The public engagements are just another tool of domination and dispossession.

They tell the people what they (TEPU) want the public to know and not what the public wishes to know or is supposed to know. In 2018, in the same bad spirit, a voluminous five thousand paged Tilenga ESIA report was shared, and BACA and local civil society organizations were given less than 14 days to comprehensively read through the document and give feedback in the interest of the local community in Buliisa.

Almost all the concerns that were highlighted by BACA and the civil society fraternity in the ESIA report were quashed by TEPU and treated with contempt.

The ESIA report went on to declare that by International Finance Corporation standards, there were no indigenous groups found in the Tilenga area. At an appropriate time, the people will deal with these injustices using facts and law.

The author is Nelson Byaruhanga, an indigenous journalist, writer, and filmmaker.

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